My gear was Westinghouse and Eaton after that which came out of the same plant. I kept fairly close with the contractors and never had any complains about the actual construction itself. The inky problem that I had was that the design engineers pulled some stupid things when going to the order entry specs to what was actually released to the floor such as supplying AL ground bus instead of CU, the wrong lenses in ILs, the way the control wiring was secured such as none of these stick of wire tie fasteners were allowed where an actual mechanical fasting technique was specified. A lot of dumb stuff like that which cost the company thousands of dollars to rectify. I could convince the customer to be nice an sign off on some things but others I couldn't. The gear was clearly not built to spec. I has been embarrassing to say the lease. But the fit and finish was always exceptional.
worst thing i've ever seen was a piece of MV gear from abbot laboratories, of buena park, calif. (long ago out of business)
$2M thereabouts worth, in a refinery... got asked the wed. before thanksgiving, to stay a couple hours, and pull some covers
off, so that hipot could be done over the 4 day weekend, to allow commissioning.... when we opened the covers, we found
signal cables sleeved thru 34.5 kv enclosures, in 1/2" aluminum flex, attached to panel enclosures with sticky backs and
tie wraps... some of the sticky backs had come loose, and the flex was hanging right above the 2,000 amp main bus, the next
couple sticky backs to come off would have dropped it across the bus when it was live.... the list went on and on... we rebuilt
the gear that weekend, brought in induction soldering equipment, even a portable plating tank for redoing the bus bars that
had to be cut and reshaped.... nothing would hipot at 50kv, corona was walking all over the gear....
your remark about stickybacks for attachment brought it to memory... i'm assuming you broker switchgear... how do you
offset contractual liability for something you provide, when the vendor supplies junk? the vendor of the above mentioned gear
closed up shop as a result of the gear mentioned above that they provided.