The real issue here might be that @rowan_ross had way too much on their plate long before they even started. In my experience, people who choke on something usually didn't have the right support or resources to begin with. Maybe they were told it would be manageable and trusted the wrong advice. Just a different way of looking at it, your mileage may vary.

Are you SURE you want to actually get lawyers involved over a few thousand bucks? lol. I put in a similar clause after getting burned on a 3 month project where the client just STOPPED answering emails. Look, small claims court judges have seen it all, they're not stupid. If your clause is clear and you can show the client agreed to it in writing, it's usually going to hold up fine. But just a heads up, don't put something crazy in there like keeping 100% or they'll throw it out for being unfair. A 50% clawback on the remaining months is totally normal and judges will enforce it because it's fair to BOTH sides. Just make sure you actually have them initial that specific section so they can't claim they didn't notice it.

My uncle ran a machine shop for 40 years and had a whole wall of "one sentence fixes" written on index cards taped to his toolbox. He said every trade has em, its the stuff you learn from bleeding on the job not reading about it.

I read this thing once from some old diesel mechanic in a forum, he said the Datsun 510 injectors from that era had these tiny brass nozzles that would warp if you soaked them too long in certain cleaners. He used 0.010 inch guitar strings on a G-series Bosch injector, said the E string was always the go-to for the main hole. Never thought about the gauge matching thing until now, but it makes a weird kind of sense.

You ever scrape off thermal paste that was so crusty it felt like scraping off old drywall mud? I've had that happen on forgotten office machines too and it's honestly the worst part of the whole upgrade. The guy at the shop probably hasn't worked on anything older than a year.