The Beginning of the End

The success with the Rim Maxaret was tempered by a dismal failure very soon after. In retrospect it was a clear set-up, probably best described as a bad joke that might have looked funny from someone else's perspective, but didn't look good for me when the concealed facts were revealed. Typical  big company politics...

 One day an apparently brand-new, unused brake disc landed on my desk with a terse note that it was "Too big". Out came the drawings and, yes, the diameter was 10mm greater than it should have been. The first journey was down to the inspection section where it was shown to be within manufacturing tolerances in every respect apart from its diameter. Several weeks of head scratching interspersed with visits to numerous departments that might be able to throw light on the problem, brought no success. The issue was a complete mystery, and I subsequently wrote my report saying that there was no explanation other than that it had been inexplicably manufactured to that size, for reasons that were a complete mystery. Of course, the moment that the report was published, out came the many other oversize discs that had been carefully hidden from sight, demonstrating that it was not unusual at all, but the usual result of testing items to beyond their elastic limit. What had been unusual about the one I had been given, however, was an astonishingly uniform circularity. All of the other examples were noticeably distorted and heat-stained, lacking the perfection of the one carefully cleaned up and used to put egg on my face. Oh, how we all laughed.

 Apart from occasional glitches such as that, our departmental success had been considerable in the three years I had been there. Machine-Capability tests and changes to the inspection regime had done the trick, and the scrap-rate was falling back to low single-figures. It was inevitable that the massive expansion of the department would eventually be reversed, but I was to uncover one more shocking fact that was to seal my fate....