Mirror Image
This is a complete reversal situation in some ways, but at my company we had an ampoule filler - you know, those glass cylinders with a snap-off top for medicines.
It was fairly ancient compared to what was available at the time, and it was very unreliable. The turret was mounted on a brass bush, and the bush was so worn that the turret rocked as it rotated, and that resulted in poor seals from the gas flame jets. The department engineer used to regularly have it down for a week to 'insert shims' to reduce the movement.
I won't go into (too much) detail here, but me - as a chemist, and technical account manager responsible for process development - got roped into being a business account manager by virtue of the existing BAM being promoted, and the incumbent BAM not being available for 12 months because of her replacement being on maternity leave. I didn't want to do it, since it involved getting involved in finance, which I had no experience with. But my company relished such situations of having people do multiple jobs they had no training in.
Anyway, on my first visit to a customer as BAM, I was met with outright aggression. It turned out we were a year behind on orders, and it was all down to that bloody machine being down half of the time. I promised I would get it sorted, and I was so sincere that I won them over. They even offered to write off all outstanding orders if I could resolve the issues.
When I got back, I kicked up a stink. Frankly, every single person who had ever allowed it to get to this stage should have been sacked because of incompetence (and that included my immediate manager, the one above him, the department manager where the machine was located, and that bloody engineer). But I got them to accept the machine needed fixing properly, and 'inserting shims' was not the way to go about it. However, it turned out that there was absolutely no way in hell they were going to get the manufacturer in to do a proper service because it 'would cost too much', so once again it fell to the department engineer.
I expected a new bush to be made from the CAD drawings. Except we didn't have CAD drawings (they'd been lost), and buying a new set from the manufacturer would also be 'too expensive'.
And guess what? The engineer removed the old bush - which had at least 15 years' of wear and tear, and was the cause of all the issues - sent it to the local 'fab shop' (aka a local engineering firm he had links with) and they knocked up a copy of the old worn bush!
I just put my head in my hands when I found out. He hadn't even considered that unless we knew the precise dimensions, any duplicate would also just duplicate the errors.