But not very often, one of the cylinders that Brian sends out fails. And he will pay for the shipping back to us and send out a brand spanking new cylinder. Regardless of how old the original one is. He's even done a couple that were obviously abused.
Well, last month we shipped one out and the customer contacted him last week, telling him it leaks. These cylinders work with tractor implements and if you can't keep your implement up when you need it up and not dragging, it will cause problems; a cylinder that leaks is a bad cylinder and needs to be fixed or replaced. Brian's allowable leak down is a quarter inch per hour. Industry standard is a lot looser than that. Industry standard is absolutely not acceptable to Brian.
Now, a bad cylinder is not the only reason the implement won't stay where you want it. Most times, it's the valves that the cylinder attaches to. And there's a way of testing that. Have the implement up and detach the cylinder from the tractor altogether. If the cylinder is bad or leaks, the implement will not stay in the same position. It will drop. Brian explained to this customer what he would need to do. The customer calls back "okay, I did that, it still leaks". Brian was skeptical that the guy had done what he was supposed to have done, but he told him to send it back and he'd fix it. It got here Friday. It was tested yesterday.
In the morning, he had a lighter weight implement attached and eight hours later, no drop. Yesterday afternoon, he changed the implement to a Gannon implement that weighs a thousand pounds. I set up the video camera. Let it run until the tape ran out, almost an hour. No drop. Brian let it set overnight. It did drop. An eighth of an inch. Well within his standards. So....the guy lied about testing the unit. Brian's a little put out because he doesn't want to be on the hook for shipping when there was nothing wrong with the cylinder. I don't blame him. He'll be contacting this guy later today.
Now, the video. Here's where I come in.
I downloaded the video to my computer. Something didn't go right and I had to do it over again. The plan was to take this video and speed it up. I have a timer plugin for my video software and I planned on running a clock with the minutes and seconds on it. It was getting late and I was getting frustrated because everytime I had it the way I wanted it to look, it would grow in size and move off of the page on the video. WTF? It's now a legacy program and doesn't have support. And that sucks. I was on my own. I finally figured out if I got rid of the keyframe option, it was static. It didn't move. Great! This morning I also used a cutaway plugin that I could select a certain area of the video and magnify that inside of a circle (or whatever else I wanted to use).
I had sped the video up and added the timer and cutaway. I added music. I was ready to put it all together when I noticed a big problem. The timer only lasts as long as the video. So, I started over. I'm saving the full video with timer, then will shrink it. It will be a tenth as long as it started out. I will add the text and music. And then I will put it up on YouTube and Brian will let the customer know that there is video of the test and explain that it's not the cylinder. (As in "there's nothing wrong with it, your problem is not the Fit Rite cylinder that I supplied, it's most likely the valves on your tractor that your dealer supplied, what do you want me to do?")
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