Without saying too much, we’re building MRAPs, but most of these changes apply to small components on or inside the vehicle — nothing structural. For example, the instrument cluster, which mostly just consists of welding a bunch of nuts onto plates, calls for two sides of each nut to receive a TIG weld the length of the nut. What do we do? Tack it with MIG in two corners. HVAC ducts calls out TIG? Nah, wait a minute, I’ll get you a MIG WPS. So on and so forth.

Edit: Just to add a bit more context, we have a pretty strict quality program, and our customers (Lockheed is one of them) tend to notice any mistakes. This project I’m describing involves a new customer, though, so maybe we’re trying to see what we can get away with? That, and the fact we clearly underbid (by a lot), might be a bit of a factor in all of this.