Not meant to be an ass kicking Don. Sorry if it came across that way.
Time and time again, I see people not setting themselves up for success and when they fail, they get pissed off and usually, they hammer through the task again and an even worse failure happens. "Attention to detail" is not a common understanding for most people. Most guys just plough through and "Get 'er Dun." And the end result is usually a short lived fix. 90% of a successful job is all in the prep including a fundamental understanding of the task at hand.
Now, about that circlip- When you have a new circlip sitting in your hand and you look at it, the ears on the circlip are a certain distance apart from each other usually somewhere around .020-.025" and when installed correctly, should look the same and have a very slight grip on the circlip groove but not so tight that you can't spin it in the groove with your finger tip.
What I see in the picture tells me that either the circlip is too small or there is something wrong with the groove. Either the edge of the groove is rolled in or there's a piece of debris in the groove preventing the circlip from fully seating. Whatever it is, you need to figure it out and fix it. I have a set of jeweller's files for cleaning up damaged metal. Another good tool especially for cleaning up circlip grooves is a 6" hacksaw blade from a coping saw. Thin enough for the job.
I figured I needed to support my thoughts with pictures so.......
This is a pic of a brand new s.s. circlip from Zed-parts and as I was saying, you can see the tabs are about .015" apart.
This is the end of my water pump shaft before cleaning the groove there was a fair bit of crud in the groove
After cleaning with a needle file
This is the new s.s. circlip installed on the shaft AND as far as I'm concerned the groove in the shaft is about .010" not deep enough in diameter. I can't spin the circlip on the shaft AND I will fix the depth of the groove before I finish this job. I've run across this kind of issue many times at the plant and I'm sharing my knowledge for your entertainment. Hopefully, people can benefit from what I try to explain. This "stuff" is not common knowledge and maybe only a few "tradesmen" would know the proper fitment of something as simple as a circlip. In nuclear and aircraft mechanics, we all know what happens when the small stuff is overlooked.
Just like 2 weeks ago when a Boeing 737 Max lost a maintenance door off of the midship. fortunately it didn't hit the elevator when it blew off and the plane was safely landed BUT during the incident, an 8 year old passenger one row behind the door, had his shirt ripped off of his body and had to endure 20 odd minutes without a shirt at below zero temperatures until the plane landed. It could have been worse. He could have been sucked out of the plane as well. What really pisses me off is that in the previous few weeks, the low cabin pressure alarm had gone off spuriously, and the crew decided it was a sensor failure rather than heeding the alarm and landing the plane for a maintenance check. Absolutely against all protocols. They should have heeded the warning rather than excusing it. What makes it even worse is that the plane was brand new like maybe 7 weeks old and if you know anything about new equipment failures you know that we call them a bathtub curve failure. if something is going to fail it will happen early in the life of the equipment or at a point in time when normal parts wear out it when time lines are met.
I had a mechanic who lost the knurled thumbwheel off of the end of a 6" caliper and unfortunately it fell off the caliper inside the 450 Mw generator housing during a shutdown overhaul. 6 months later we had a catastrophic failure of that generator and we found the cause. That knurled thumbwheel made its way into the generator windings and caused a short in the windings. $7 million dollars for a new generator rotor and a 63 day shutdown to change out the rotor at $3 million dollars a day in lost revenue. All this because of a simple lack of attention to detail. The mechanic logged in the 6" caliper and logged out the caliper in the Foreign Material Exclusion document, but he failed to ensure the tool was intact. 50 cent part that caused a $200 million dollar repair. This kind of stuff makes a Supervisor (me) grow gray hair
This might be a better pic of before cleaning
And this is after I had cleaned up with the needle file and this is what I had installed the circlip on. Note the ridge at the bottom and top of the groove that probably is still holding up the circlip off of the bottom of the groove. it doesn't take much especially when the groove is so shallow.