Caring for the customers

Typical call, the owner has a van that he does all his own work on and it failed the emissions test. Being a 95 it gets the TSI which is a two speed idle test in Western Pa. My first thought was it's a van, yuck. I've never liked working on them and the older I get and the harder it is to move around it just gets more unpleasant. The guy was fun to talk to however and he wasn't really too interested in repairing it right now as much as he wants to do just enough that it qualifies for a waiver sticker. To get a waiver in Pa the owner only has to spend up to $150 attempting to repair the car. Only certified repair technicians can authorize a waiver so he was told to call us. When diagnostics and repairs are done by a shop the whole bill can be applied towards the waiver fee. If the owner does the work himself only the parts that were used qualify and he has to provide the receipts for the parts, have two failed emissions tests and then the technician has to confirm that the work was done and follow the rest of the routine to authorize the waiver. The customer had only put on about $70 in parts so he didn't qualify for the waiver yet, but they could be applied towards it and if we do the diagnostics that would get him to where he needs to be. He joked about just getting a bill to put him over the limit but I have my policy on that and if he has to spend a dime we make sure that he gets some value out of the expense and we really work towards making an improvement in the vehicles performance. (I won't throw parts for the sake of throwing parts). The last thing we agreed on was since this is a (conversion) van and the engine cover needs to be removed, he would pull the passengers front seat and have the engine cover fully exposed so that I would not have to spend any time doing that. He set his appointment for this morning (Friday).

This morning he called to let us know that he couldn't keep his appointment today. His son went into sudden cardiac arrest last night and he has been in the hospital with him all night and he had to head back there. The worst part was when he said that it doesn't look good for his son. Meanwhile he was apologizing for not being able to make it in and was worried that it would be an issue for us. All I could do was offer our sympathies and let him know that we would add his son to our prayers and re-assured him that his family was more important and taking care of his van can wait. We will be there for him when he is ready, and for him to not worry about us because I have plenty of work to keep me busy. Just thinking about what he was going through put a dark cloud on the whole day.

Silver Bullets don't make for a real diagnostic routine

In one of the classes I present I have a point where I paint a little picture for the techs and the shop owners and it goes like this.

Picture you have a 2005 Chevrolet Malibu come into the shop and its setting a P0101 Mass Airflow sensor performance. You test the system and confirm the sensor has dropped out of calibration, replace it and road test the car confirming that it is indeed repaired.

Now imagine nineteen more Chevrolet Malibu's and every one of them set that same P0101, and every one of them is repaired by replacing the mass airflow sensor. "How do you approach the twenty-first Malibu that shows up at the shop setting a P0101?"

In your perspective Steve, (Steve is a moderator on another forum) and in the ideas of anyone who works like you are thinking, you would replace the mass airflow sensor and ship the car. But what if that doesn't fix this car and the light comes back on setting the same code? In that customers eye's they got ripped off, you don't know what you are doing, and they would be correct. (Never mind the fact that you got it right twenty times) The correct answer for that twenty first Malibu should have been to test it exactly the same as you did the first one, and the nineteen in-between and the details would have led you to find the restricted exhaust, or whatever caused the volumetric efficiency of the engine to fall below design expectations. That by the way is what the code really means which is that the airflow being reported by the mass air sensor at a given engine speed and throttle opening is below the threshold value. Sure a sensor under-reporting the airflow will generate that code but its not the only reason that could happen.

The trap here is someone who pulls the code, and throws the part if they get it right can be really fast and can in fact make themselves more money while they are risking getting caught doing sloppy work. The tech who stays disciplined in his/her approach gets it right every time, but since that takes longer, they actually in many cases make less money by the end of the week. What's worse is when that twenty-first car comes back, shops often direct that not to the tech who did the first repair, but to the one who will make sure to figure out what is wrong and solve the problem. Oh, and since its a comeback that means the customer likely isn't getting charged so there is no diagnostic time to be paid and that means the tech isn't getting paid either, well at least not directly. When I worked at the dealership they would promise to "make up the time" by giving me pre-delivery inspections, or other gravy tickets. (The same kinds of work that have grown to be known as wallet flushing)

As far as finding sites dedicated to mechanics that you mention, there are other sites that you likely have never been to that don't advise techs to rely on silver bullets. In fact we prove why trying to do that hurts them as well as the customer and the trade in general. As part of a group (Edmunds) that tries to advise consumers correctly it makes no sense to continue to promote poor habits as if they are really valid. More than 50% of what I do each day is something I've never seen before and likely won't see twice in my career. That's why problems like the fuel pump wiring harness issue mentioned wouldn't even be a note-able event. Nine months the guy fought with that problem that should have been addressed in under an hour. I do blame the perspective that having to rely on someone seeing that failure before in order to solve it is what it took. That's totally false and misleading for the consumers.

Imagine diagnosing a loss of communication between the computers on a Mazda where the chip in the transmission controller that drives the communication signal is failing and causing it to send out a pulsed wave that steps on other modules communication bits. Now also understand that the body computer also acts as the connection hub for the high speed CAN "STAR" network that this is crashing and multiple modules connect to it in ganged plugs. On that car it just so happens that the PCM shares the same plug as the transmission controller, and since the PCM has one of the termination resistors in it so disconnecting that plug shuts down the entire bus the moment that it is disconnected. On top of that, once the network shuts down the problem disappears and it then will take up to half an hour of operation for it to re-occur. That's the kinds of problems that guys like me often deal with today, and tonight I'll be demonstrating how to figure that car out to the techs that are in the class I'm teaching. Just taking the idea that the network is crashing and saying that the transmission controller needs to be replaced isn't good enough because that's what fixed that one car. As a shop you'll make yourself and your tech look foolish when that doesn't work the next time because there is a different cause for the loss of the network. That's the way a techs job really is and the silver bullet stuff needs to be put away with the points and condensers.

#Silver Bullet, #silver, #bullet, #CAN, #wallet flushing,

I'm going to try and upload a little video. This is my Escape with just over 30% oil life left on the monitor and the engine has a little over 65,000 miles.

Steve on Edmunds posted that he was irritated by a picture of an engine that was nearly spotless inside at some 100,000 miles. Well maybe he should be irritated if his engine doesn't look like this inside. BTW the average mileage for each service is 7400 miles, with a high of 9100 one time when there was still 9% oil life left. At our shop we only use oils that meet the O.E specs, that doesn't mean it has to come from the manufacturer but it takes a little more effort to choose the correct product for your car than to just look for the viscosity on a store shelf.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k770HSmZU1c&feature=youtu.be

 

 

 

2010 Ford Escape AC. What I found

 

 

I finally got to attend to my Escape’s AC, and I wasn’t surprised by what I found.

If you recall the static pressures were taken after the car had been sitting for more than an hour, and with it not working right I had not turned the system on for more than a week. The last thing that was expected was for the high and low pressure sides to not be equalized. Upon seeing that they were not equal, and excessively high on top of that, this wasn’t just a broken car, someone had done something that made it even worse.

The normal routine for a car that a shop isn’t familiar with is to use a refrigerant identifier for the first step, and then a sealant test for the second one. The following photos are from my refrigerant identifier. It gets connected to the low side and a small sample is bled off of the system. In the past some people would substitute propane for R-12, hence the need to detect hydrocarbons, and other blends would use R22 to boost pressures in the systems under the assumption that would force more refrigerant liquid through the expansion valve or orifice tube. In an expansion valve system with a receiver drier, there may be some validity to that assumption but not so much with an orifice tube type system. One other contaminant is air. Just like R22 in an automotive system air, nitrogen and oxygen isn’t condensable into a liquid at the pressures and temperatures that the system runs at.  By not being able to make it change state between a liquid and a gas being in the system forces the pressures higher but doesn’t help the system produce any cooling at all.

 

So here is the first picture from my identifier, and it shows that there is no R-12, or R-22 in the system.

 

This second picture shows that the refrigerant is R134 but also that 15% of the sample taken was air. So how did air get into the system?

 

 

That we may never know but the identifier just confirmed the suspicion of why the pressures in the system were so high. There easily could have been a service performed where someone’s AC equipment hasn’t been maintained correctly and they may have drawn air into their recycle tank. Maybe the system was discharged and sat open for a period of time and then was charged without being evacuated. That one seems the most likely and could also explain the system having sealant added to it. As you will see in the next photos the sealant was responsible for the system stopping working.

 

 
 

 

   This is the receiver drier, some of the AC oil can be seen in the connection port and that is the outlet that the hose to the expansion valve connects to. The schreader connection at the top of the photo is for the high side pressure sensor. The next photos are the desiccant cup and filters from inside the drier assembly.






       

Here is what is inside the drier assembly. The orange plastic circle is the top lock for the filter and the desiccant beads that are inside the black cup, these all fit into the bottom of the drier assembly. The tube passes through the center of the cup so that liquid refrigerant that collects underneath the filter and desiccant cup is fed to the outlet of the drier and onto the expansion valve.

These are the felt filters that are at the top and bottom of the cup, their job is to hold the desiccant beads in the cup as well as be a filter for the system.

In order to make the sealant more visible I took the top filter screen and cut it in half and flipped part of it over. As you compare the picture above and this one, note the swirl pattern visible from the spaces in the orange lock disc, that's the top side. Then on the bottom side you will notice two colors, both a grey and spots of green. The green is the sealant that has crystalized in the felt.









The last two photos are of the expansion valve. There was no way to know if it was OK or not prior to disassembly other than to replace the drier, and then run and test the system. With the system already open it made more sense to simply plan and replace it which also allowed me to flush oil and sealant from the evaporator core as well.