Posted on 12/26/2009 7:35:28 PM PST by DemforBush
dittos — ‘plug-&-pray component bingo game’
And I get a bunch of new parts that I wouldn’t get from the auto repair guy. After spending 100s in diagnostics, I realized they knew less than I did. I bought the best $300 Actron diagnostic tool with graphing and have at it.
Right now I have an choice of two ‘buys’ to try and fix another new problem.
right way right: “Your challenge is to find a good honest tech.”
That’s true for just about any task. Going to a dealership isn’t any guarantee you’ll get a good tech.
Really, you think they would do that? LOL
Information hiding is the new wave. From the White House to your car.
Tarpon: “Information hiding is the new wave. From the White House to your car.”
And it’s entirely a business’s right to do so. The government, on the other hand, is supposed to work for me.
People who don’t have the skill or inclination to repair their cars are really, really dependent on the good graces of dealers and mechanics. That’s a position I refuse to be in until I’m so old I simply can’t do my own work any more.
If you want something done right, do it yourself!
Your right, in fact , when you take your car in for warranty you are likely to get a less experienced tech working on your car.
Why? because the Manufacture only pays so much for any particular repair.
The more senior techs will push these job onto the lesser techs in the food chain because the companies are really tight in the times they will pay for.
If a writer messes up bids a low bid on a particular job, guess who gets it?
Yes, it’s business’s right to do so, but they are doing it purposely to prevent independent shops from repairing your car. Much less yourself.
I believe you can make the case on the grounds it is unfair competition to withhold diagnostic information from the person who bought the product. My car has two sets, at least, of diagnostics, one which is accessed by OBDII and the other that is factory proprietary. If you have the know-how you can generally with a good diag tool get it down to a few parts. But it is expensive. A while back I was guessing which $500 part to buy, I guessed right — now the car is back running perfectly — But still, it’s not fair.
The white house just wants to turn the USA into a dictatorship ... what’s wrong with that.
I’m a tinkerer. Largely, I don’t mind computer controls. IMHO,OBD II really cleaned things up. One fifty dollar piece of equipment can point you in the right direction for any car sold in The USA. BTW, most of the sensors involved deal with emissions controls...but they are ‘real’ pollutants, and its not a bad idea to have emissions controls. The ability to reprogram the computer is rarely needed, and usually not in the tinkerer’s skill set. From a tinkerer’s point of view, I am much more concerned with the need for special tools, and some elaborate parts - I dread changing some of the hoses on my Expedition, for example, because they look like a manifold. What should cost seven dollars will surely cost eighty. I think this is really where most consumers will feel the pinch (special parts).
I miss the old days.
Me too. I remember the day when all you needed for a tune up was a set of spark plugs, a timing light, a tach & dwell meter, some feeler gauges and some assorted hand tools. Maybe a vacuum gauge too. I remember buying my first timing light & TDM set for about $25!
Mark
Points/condensor?
But I refuse to be trapped to the stealership ... so I'm making an effort to stay current on repairs.
Actually, if one has access to Alldata auto info, there is a ton of stuff that can be fixed w/o stopping by the $95 an hour crowd's hangout.
:-) I sell the tools that mechanics need to do exactly this type of programming. The information is in fact available to these independent shops, but the environment is becoming so technical and so fast that the very business model is changing for independent garages and they’re dividing into the technical shops or the old style garages.
Back in Vancouver, mechanics are heading back to school because the technology in each car e.g. Mercedes and BMW are engines whose versions are upgraded every year. They have no choice but to go to night school/part time to upgrade their skills or else: go like the dinosaur.
It was obviously some kind of computer problem but we could never figure it out. When we restarted the engine, and headed for the repair shop we could never get the problem to repeat itself at the shop. There were no computer error codes to be found in diagnostic testing. The problem could not be identified or replicated.
I decided the Impala was too dangerous to drive and traded it in on a 2003 Jeep Liberty which has proven to be a reliable vehicle.
The problem with computer-controlled vehicles is you can have software or firmware problems which can never be properly identified and corrected.
I believe we are reaching a point where technology has rendered us helpless victims.
I guess we're reduced to clinging to our classic firearms that still work the old-fashioned way.
All of our other gadgets have become an unsolved mystery.
If Uncle Sugar keeps on buying clunkers, there will be very few junk yards. Around here, the old cars are crushed and trucked off to be recycled. I have an old 1981 F-100 that I love to drive. It is getting hard to find parts locally. Most replacement parts can be bought over the Internet.
I wonder if a plain old electric fuel pump couldn’t be rigged inline and work just as well. Once I had a dog bite through the fuel lines underneath an F-150 with dual fuel tanks. The replacement fuel line cost over a hundred dollars and there were warnings, “Do not use flexible fuel hose to repair.” I bought a short piece of plain old flexible hose and a couple of clamps and reconnected the fuel line and I never had a problem, I sold the truck nearly fifteen years later and it was still working fine.
There is so much junk in the tank that I would’nt know where to start eliminating.Its by design I’m sure.
Its by design I’m sure.
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Rube Goldberg must have inspired modern automobile design. The valve that switched between the two tanks on my 89 f-150 was incredibly complicated and expensive, there was a fuel pump in each tank that pumped gas to the valve. The valve went bad once when I was a hundred miles from home and I thought it was leaking. I used about twenty gallons of gas to get home and when my favorite mechanic checked the truck out he explained that the fuel from the front tank was being pumped into the rear tank and had been overflowing. If I had known this I could have switched to the rear tank and been okay. I drove it for some time afterward by just using the rear tank until it was nearly empty and then switching the switch to the front tank position which would cause the rear tank to be refilled from the front tank as I drove. When the front tank got low, which didn’t take long, I simply switched back to the rear tank. Nobody could tell me that all that junk is necessary, the old Volkswagen beetle had a main tank and a reserve tank and only used one external fuel pump and a simple mechanical valve operated by a little lever in the floorboard to switch tanks.
It made about as much sense as a Gravely tractor like I used to run, the Kohler engine has a mechanical fuel pump, the fuel line runs from the tank which is ABOVE the carburetor down to the pump at the base of the engine and the fuel is pumped back up to the carburetor. I bypassed the fuel pump entirely and it made absolutely no difference in the running of the engine.
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