Amazing disappearing error 1004

I wrote some VBA to copy a range from a worksheet and paste it as values to another worksheet in the same workbook. It failed with error 1004. I set the macro recorder running and collected the code generated when I performed the operation by hand. As a stand-alone macro, it worked without error. When I appended these lines of code unaltered to my existing macro, error 1004 again appeared. After some trial and error, I found that if I segregated the copy/paste to a subroutine and called it with the source range as a parameter, it ran without error. So, summarising:

    Sheets("Contract Auth").Select
    r.Select
    Selection.Copy
    Sheets("SupportCalculator").Select
    Range("A2").Select
    Selection.PasteSpecial Paste:=xlPasteValues, Operation:=xlNone, SkipBlanks _
        :=False, Transpose:=False

....fails with error 1004. But:

Test(r)

..runs without error, when Test is defined as:

Sub Test(r As Range)

    Sheets("Contract Auth").Select
    r.Select
    Selection.Copy
    Sheets("SupportCalculator").Select
    Range("A2").Select
    Selection.PasteSpecial Paste:=xlPasteValues, Operation:=xlNone, SkipBlanks _
        :=False, Transpose:=False

End Sub

What is going on?

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I will do this for you on this occasion only.

You have not set r to a range which could be your problem

Avoid lots of other problems by not selecting everything in sight!!
Selecting is usually not required
It slows everything down

So if r is A1:A10

Sheets("Contract Auth").Range("A1:A10").Copy

Sheets("SupportCalculator").Range("A2").PasteSpecial (xlPasteValues)

Selecting things
If it is necessary to select sheets & cells.....
..for sheets I generally use Activate

Sheets("Sheet1").Activate

Activate a sheet before trying to select any cells

...for cells use Select

Sheets("Sheet1").Range("A1").Select

If you want to select several sheets(to do the same thing to all of them) then use select (only one sheet can be active at the same time)

r is set. I'm not that dumb!

Perhaps not
How are we supposed to know that? We cannot read invisible code
Free advice for you : Expect dumb answers if you provide incomplete information