Originally Posted by
RGMN
Nice to see someone has fought the same issues. Sometimes I feel like I'm the only one who's seen them. A couple of engineers at my company recently retire. Them, myself, and 1 other engineer were the corporate subject matter experts on connector issues. I'm now trying to train up a few others but I doubt I'll get it done before I depart the company in December. I feel sorry for the engineer that will be left. I had a engineer who couldn't believe that water would actually wick thru a wire. I told him he either needed to vent his electronics housing or use blocked wire to stop the water ingress issue he was seeing. He didn't listen and a customer experienced some spectacular failures due to water ingress into the electronics. We are now in the middle of a recall to replace 12,000 units with units that have a GoreTex vent.
I've been in a couple of positions where I seemed to be one of the few who had enough experience to avoid doing dumb things (or at least smart enough to not do dumb things two or three times). People would come to me, looking for advice on their problem, and after answering the same question a couple of times, started writing up some design guidelines. I had seen similar guidelines earlier in my career, which contained a lot of the lessons that were learned the hard way.
I hope someone is updating the guidelines that I've written, but I don't expect it. There hasn't been much respect for technical knowledge for quite a while. People seem to think you can just hire a new, cheap engineer and they somehow know everything. Well, even if management never really appreciated some of the wise engineers that helped train me, I know that I appreciate them!
Steve in Peoria