Possible insight into harness issue

[Greg B]

Hello,
At another forum for a different product, a ribbon cable issue has begun to surface after the device has been in service several years. The following post sounded suspiciously familiar. The poster is an authority who rarely, if ever, even makes a typo in his information.

"The Great **** Ribbon Cable Problem resulted from them thinking that the connectors were "standard" and a plug from one vendor would mate properly with a socket from another vendor. Well, they managed to be so lucky as to find a pair that didn't quite mate right, and the socket shaved a little bit of metal off the pins when the two were mated. After a while, the contact became unreliable. For a while, they were fixing the problem by cleaning and lubricating the ribbon connectors rather than replacing them. The actual damage is to the male pins, at least half of which are mounted to PC boards or assemblies (like a disk drive) so they never really replaced the damaged part, just the part that caused the damage."

At first blush, it makes way too much sense.

[Greg B]

Just one Monday bump. This still gets my votes as best theory for the harness issue, and implies that if it fails once, it could again.