Working for the Government

I will be the first to tell you that I don’t particularly like working with the government. Our company got stiffed by the US Navy a few years back and it has left a bad taste in our collective mouth ever since. For a while, we just refused to service the accounts, but patriotism and respect for the military finally got us going again on it, although we require payment first nowadays.

So we get a call from an Air Force Base, a Training Base, that has a simulator down because of an Indramat drive. They are desperate, as they have already sent two drives out to “Bob’s BBQ and Servo Drive Repair Shoppe,” they are 3 weeks and counting on the repair, and they have just had a third unit go out.

We have an emergency exchange unit on the shelf that will work, which is no surprise, because we have the largest selection of emergency replacement components in the nation for Indramat electric motion control.

So they send their maintenance manager up and we get the CC, give him the unit and everyone is happy. They want to set us up in the system, and we look forward to future business with them.
Here is the interesting thing. They need a statement of conformity saying that the drive was repaired with factory new components, to factory specifications. Since these things are going on the military equivalent of Level 6 Full Motion Training Simulators, that makes perfect sense, and we had no problem sending that letter as our drives are factory repairs with full factory warranties.

My question is, what does “Bob’s BBQ and Servo Drive Repair Shoppe” do for this letter?

Indramat doesn’t sell parts to third party repair shops. They don’t share factory specs. It is not possible for any letter supplied by Bob and his ilk to be honest.

They can’t get new components, they don’t have a factory repair procedure, yet they still take the government work.

That, to me, sounds dangerous.