The Troubleshooter’s logbook

Stories

Every story here actually happened. No fiction. No embellishment. Just life as an industrial troubleshooter who somehow kept ending up where history—and human nature—were unfolding.

The archive

Start with a story

A red 1975 Corvette at an East German checkpoint

Story No. 1 · East Germany · c. 1987–88

The Red Corvette, the Bearings, and the Stasi

A routine delivery of ten one-way bearings. One five-minute handoff. One spontaneous U-turn before Berlin—and a bright red 1975 Corvette that made the whole thing look like espionage.

“Take the note out of your left rear trouser pocket.”

Read Story No. 1 →
The handmade climate-controlled console room in the Cairo printing plant

Story No. 2 · Cairo, Egypt · 1989

The Coldest Room in Egypt

A handmade air-conditioned room was built inside a sweltering print shop to protect Planeta’s Varicontrol console. The workers discovered it before the electronics arrived.

Read Story No. 2 →
Late-night troubleshooting in a Kempten Gasthaus with a napkin sketch showing 360 and 720 degree timing

Story No. 3 · Kempten im Allgäu · c. 1989

The Missing 360 Degrees

A proven IFM retrofit suddenly behaved like an intermittent fault. The encoder was counting perfectly—it just did not know which half of a 720-degree impression-cylinder cycle it was looking at.

The answer showed up at three in the morning on a Gasthaus napkin.

Read Story No. 3 →

Troubleshooting method

The Machine Is Only Part of the System

Talk to the crew. Read the installer’s annotated manual. Look for fresh tool marks. Sometimes the clue is the part of the story somebody left out.

Field note in preparation →

Story archive

Blocked the Entrance

Another true case from the Troubleshooter archive. The full record will be added here when it is ready—without inventing the missing parts.

Coming to the logbook →

The logbook is growing. Finished stories are added here in sequence; incomplete cases stay in the workshop until the facts are ready.