Got a few minutes? Part 2.

• OK. So you want to know about the laws in your state (country), well then either go to law school and study until the end of time, or consult a lawyer and hope that he/she is truly up on the subject at hand. Now if you want to know about auto repair and how cars really work I guess you should go to tech school and study until the end of time or else consult a lawyer!
  
  OK, maybe that's not fair but then again that's the point, being fair. In the linked podcast Mr. Lehto describes buying a used car and even with a blank check the shop only replaced the spark plugs. It's notable right here that we don't know anything about this car, make, model, year, mileage, previous repair history etc.
  
  Over the last few years if you have paid attention to the information that has been shared the first thing that you should realize is that you can't take any given symptom on any given car and automatically know what is wrong, and especially what part to replace. People often guess with respect to a given symptom what part(s) may be causing an issue and like any guess they just might be right. However when it comes to really being proficient one has to test, not guess because when it comes to service and repair the guesses will quickly lead to one of Mr. Lehto's top five rip-offs where part after part get's replaced. Experience has taught top techs that nobody can just tell you what is wrong based on a symptom, but we can tell you how to test and prove what is wrong.
  
  In some of the threads here in the forums we have discussed the issues about only replacing the spark plugs on today's cars and this actually dates back into the mid 80's once computer controls hit the scene and the engines were designed to run a leaner air fuel ratio. (I promise that I'll try and do this without writing an entire book on engine performance so there may be some portions of this that deserve to be explained in greater detail). In the podcast Mr. Lehto praises the shop for only replacing the plugs and not the plug wires. That is actually a mistake on the shop's part and anyone who listens to the podcast who doesn't know better could listen to Mr. Lehto and then stop trusting a shop or the technician who correctly advises to replace both as a set.
  
  There are several things that happen when someone tries to do only the plugs, or only the wires. As the boots deteriorate from the engine heat and simple aging that not only weakens their insulating capability but it also causes them to harden. In that condition when they are removed and re-installed on the plugs they cause microscopic scratches on the insulating porcelain of spark plug. Any damage to that surface can allow spark to start to jump outside of the cylinder instead of across the gap of the plug. When that happens it results in carbon tracking of the plug and the plug-boot. We learned this the hard way back in the 80's and 90's when we used to still pull plugs to inspect them. Back then it was quite common to pull and inspect the plugs and quite often we found nothing wrong with them, so we would re-gap them and put them back in. Then, and it could be a few days to a few months later the car would come back and now it had a misfire that it didn't have only a few days before and we would then find an external carbon track on the plugs. The real fun then was that if you didn't replace both the plug and the wire at that point was you ended up re-transferring that carbon track from which ever component you didn't replace to the one that you did and the car would keep developing repeated misfire conditions until someone finally came along and replaced all of the plugs and wires at the same time.
  
  This didn't happen in the 70's and earlier cars but it happened frequently when leaner engine designs became the norm. Today when you are driving your car down the highway it takes anywhere from around 9000v to some 20,000v to fire the spark plugs depending on the operating conditions.(avg. 12000v-15000v) The richer air fuel ratio's of the older cars only required 5000v to 12,000v so even though the same scratches could occur to the older model plugs the spark demand inside the cylinder simply wasn't usually high enough to force the spark to get to jump outside of the spark plug like newer cars can.
  
  The things that contribute to the spark demand voltage that is required to ionize the gap of a plug are primarily the air fuel ratio in the cylinder, the compression of the cylinder, the plug gap, and the timing of when the plug is fired. It gets pretty complicated but essentially the leaner the air/fuel ratio the higher the voltage demand will be. The same goes for compression, the higher the compression the greater the demand voltage as well as the closer the ignition timing is to TDC and the wider the plug gap. As a technician road testing a car many misfires can be proven to be ignition spark leakage related by simply understanding this and operating the vehicle during a road test in ways that cause the spark demand voltage to be raised and lowered to see if the tendency for the cylinder to misfire changes. When you take all of this into perspective and especially since the number one reason to try and prevent misfires is to protect the catalytic convertor one should avoid inspecting and re-installing spark plugs or replace only the plugs or the wires (plug boots coil on plug) individually. 

Got a few minutes? Check out this lawyers podcast. Part 1

• Got nineteen minutes to spare? Then sit back and take a listen to the podcast that I mentioned above.
  
  In it he talks about some shops telling a consumer that there is a law that makes it illegal for the owner to take their car if the brakes are found to be unsafe. He is correct in that there is no such law. Now if he stopped right there then there would be no issue, but as you will see he carries this out and makes a number of other statements that really need to be examined closer.
  
  While there is no law that states the shop can keep the owner from taking the car, the shop can be held liable if something did happen when the owner does take the car. This kind of thing is sort of like playing the game of "Cups and Balls" with Penn and Teller. From the shops point of view they have as much of a chance at being held liable for someone else's actions as you do of knowing which cup the ball is under. In this example, you could replay the video or else back it up and then you would get the answer for a given event, but shops don't get to have that kind of an option.
  
  One of the key points that Mr. Lehto tries to make is "If the brakes were that unsafe, how did the owner get the car there in the first place?" The answer is without the owner having total regard for him/herself nor the other motorists that were out there on the road with them. Frankly I don't think there is a law against that either. but maybe he will finally chime in and let everyone know. (Doubtful)
  
  In a real event where a car is genuinely unsafe to be driven the only safe thing that the shop can do is have the car towed to where-ever the owner wants it to go and if the owner won't pay to do that then the shop should. The laws that are on the books don't protect the shop from liability at that point no matter what is signed in the form of a waiver, or how much documentation has taken place so they might as well go ahead and lose a little right now instead of risking even the time that it would take to fight any other legal challenges. At least once the car is on the tow truck the shop has truly done the best that they could under the circumstances at that point in time. Now "some" lawyers will probably argue that and make a good point one way or the other but they still look like Teller with the "Cups and Balls" from my point of view. BTW, the advice of having the car towed from the shop comes from the repair associations lawyer and even they say that the customer can still refuse that solution, drive the car away and turn around and try and hold the shop liable if something does happen.
  
  Later in that podcast Mr. Lehto talks about a shop that he goes to and recommends. He talks a good bit about how he bought a used car that he took to them and he trusts them so much that he told them to do anything and everything that the car needed, no questions asked. I'll discuss that with the next post.

A Response to a Lemon Law Lawyer

Mr. Steve Lehto  posted an article on the web that can be found here.

http://carbuying.jalopnik.com/top-5-ways-mechanics-rip-off-customers-1717682723

It deserved a response which I posted there and am re-posting here........

Do you think this essay is going to change anything for the consumer? Beyond trying to stir up more contempt for an already troubled trade what was the real intention of writing this? Don’t you see this as just another attempt to create a problem so that the author gets to try to be the solution aka "The Hero"?

Take this essay and most of the derogatory responses and put them all together and you see a picture of people on the outside who have no idea what it actually takes to be the shop and especially the technician that the consumer needs at the ready. Unlike many other careers, when it comes to really mastering the craft it takes some twenty years after tech school to really excel at being “a mechanic”, with one caveat and that would be if the cars didn’t change. So really when it comes to mastering being an automotive technician there is no finish line, the learning never stops. Time and again you will see anecdotal stories about some problem that occurred where a technician failed and someone with little to no experience ended up the hero. The truth is that majority of those “stories” leave out a lot of the details and just like one of the comments above where multiple issues have to be dealt with before a car is completely repaired everyone is fast to the assumption that only the last thing that needed done was “THE PROBLEM”. The reality is while that can be the case it is usually the exception and the more common and real situation is people often put off getting their car serviced when the first problem occurs, and then when a second or third (and on and on) until something finally forces their hand and they have to get it attended to.  The dilemma for the automotive technician then is which problem(s) should he/she attend to? Try to identify and fix them all and this essay and many of the responses paint a picture of them being unethical. Meanwhile only attend to the worst one, or some of them in any fashion and the tech now gets to be viewed as incompetent and the stage is set for someone else to play the hero role.  After a few years of dealing with that kind of nonsense and the consumer pressure from it what ultimately ends up occurring is the tech leaves the trade for greener grass and that is usually well before the twenty odd years that it takes for someone with the right kind of intellect and natural talent to genuinely become a master at the trade.

Today the cars don’t break like they used to, service intervals have been extended and those two facts that consumers really should love about today’s cars have a dark side. Since the cars don’t break as often as they used to there is less work for the shops and technicians to perform. On top of that the work that does come through the door today is best described by this statement. After nearly forty years as a technician, three out of five things that I do today are something that I have never seen before and it is very unlikely that I will see twice. For myself as a technician that’s OK, I’ve studied and invested in myself for my entire career and am perfectly suited to work at that level. But what about someone fresh out of trade school? That person is fifteen to twenty years of hard work and endless study from being ready to step into place after my career is finished. Oh, I almost forgot to mention the prospective person that the consumer needs to enter the automobile repair trade today is the same one that is usually headed off to engineering school. Coming out of engineering school that young person expects to have a career that will see them making six digits and have great benefits. You do realize that is something they are unlikely to ever see repairing cars even though its getting to be the same job when you really understand the robotics that make today’s cars work. So here we are needing that young man or woman to come into this trade to better serve you the consumer and what you are really doing with this article and its comments is making it less likely that will occur.

There is a reason that lawyers need input from expert witnesses and this article demonstrates that quite nicely. In training classes we often challenge the students with a relatively simple sounding question. “What is a trouble code?” Mr. Lehto the author of this article in all likelihood cannot answer that simple question correctly and the same would go for the majority of the responders here. That’s OK because they aren’t technicians and haven’t really studied the technology that is used  to get a computer to generate a trouble code. Inside the trade many junior technicians today also cannot answer that question either and that of course is a problem.  The senior technicians inside the trade who are also instructors want our new generation of technicians to not only be able to answer that question they need to be able to deal with questions that are infinitely more difficult.

To the consumers who recognize that they need talented technicians to service their cars you should see what Mr. Lehto has done here is essentially added one more obstacle towards getting them the training that you need them to have. As a lemon law lawyer maybe that’s what his real intentions are. Without techs that can actually fix the cars, he’d have more work and make more money. If he is really concerned about the consumer wouldn’t doing something that would make it be more likely for you to find talented technicians who would fix your car correctly the first time do more for you instead?

Before I rant on all day a few closing comments about some of the comments. No shop could suddenly charge labor alone and stop generating profits from the sales of parts and survive. Consumer pricing pressure simply wouldn’t tolerate what the labor rates would need to be. For anyone who has ever solved some automotive issue and think that is the measure of your technical prowess, why didn’t you become an automotive technician in the first place? Maybe, just maybe, you have the kind of talent that could have let you become the technician that the trade and consumers really need (needed). How much would you have demanded to be paid to be a technician as compared to what you did choose for a career? Were you simply not willing to give up the potential for your present lifestyle for the meager one that being a technician would have afforded you?  

The trade faces a significant shortage of qualified technicians that is some forty plus years in creating. Now combine that with the real demands that make it take twenty plus years to become the master technician today and you have a real problem that won’t be corrected anytime soon and all of the negativity and hate in the comments will only serve to make that be even longer.

It's good to be getting back up to speed.

Hi Everyone.

It's been a while since I've been blogging and you deserve to know what's been going on. In November I had surgery to reduce the pressure on my spinal cord in my neck. The discs had all failed and were causing spinal stenosis. The surgery performed fused C2 through C6 and the recovery forced us to shut the shop down. In order to get by we sold our flat bed truck and leaned heavily on providing training classes.

One of the other things that I have started doing is a lot more of the mobile diagnostics. Between already having all of the tools that were required and the fact that a lot of the physical side of the job has become much more challenging for me it just made sense. While its taking a lot longer for that to grow than I would prefer it has been a good experience. Meanwhile things are shaping up at home. Instead of working one hundred hour weeks, which is known as living to work, there has been a lot more time to be in the house and attend to its needs and I find myself working just enough to live. Well, almost anyway. Things have to pick up a bit as money is getting a little too tight on occasion but considering what we have gone through it could be worse. I'll be investigating some other avenues and hopefully the writing that I have been doing for free up to this time will start to generate some return.