Category: Cars (Page 4 of 5)

There once was a time not so long ago where if you had taken a car’s engine apart for some serious rebuilding, that half the work was getting it running good again. You had to massage the mixture, cajole the timing, and usually had to accept some irregularity or other. That stuff is all over.

As long as you put everything back together properly, and without adjusting anything, all you have to do is hook up the battery and turn the key. The engine comes to life immediately, with no hint of it’s latest major sugery… and not only just run, but run good. (disclaimer: the mechanic does have to put it back together properly…)

One interesting thing about computerized engine controls are the idle motors. Back in the 60’s and 70’s getting a car to idle approached something of an art. You had to balance all the factors involved to get what you wanted… did you want it to run clean, or run good? You usually couldn’t have both.. now you get it all. Idle motors work good, so good in fact that they rarely fail, and if you start your car and put it in gear and lay off the brakes, your car will idle itself at about 6mph to Los Angeles if you have enough gas.

Engine computers will also tell you whats wrong with themselves also. Engine failure codes were sparse and not very informative in the 80’s. For example, you would get a code like 42492.. which meant the mixture was incorrect on driving. This could mean anything that had anything to do with the motor could be at fault. It was like having someone tell you your cars running bad. You already knew it. And the fault code list was limited to about 20 generalized codes. Now the number of codes for an engine system runs into the hundreds and are much more detailed as to the fault.

The reason you need codes in modern engine systems is somewhat akin to the larger picture humans have to deal with in modern life. And that is, things are not intuitive anymore. A hundred years ago, the average mechanic could understand everything about the machines he worked on, because you could see the problems and relate to them in a physical way. Now you relate to the problems on a theoretical level, and you have to trust your machines to tell you what’s going on. But it is a miracle it works at all, much less works as good as it does.

We don’t even think about it, and we don’t need to, till it hiccups…

Driving cars way back in the Fifties, we were lucky we had wipers at all. The wiper motors were driven by vacuum, a source the motor only provided at idle, or at cruising speed. There usually was no vacuum when you needed it the most. Now wiper motors are powered by electric motors and are there for you always.

Sometime during that period they invented intermittent wipers. These were great! It always seemed that when it rained, it didn’t rain enough to leave the wipers on all the time, or it just rained enough that you couldn’t leave them off. My old 1990 Ford Van doesn’t have them. Leave it up to the Americans to make some crucial device an option!

But intermittent wipers have changed. Now they have a slider switch of some sort on them so that you can adjust the interval. You would think this would be great, as even intermittent wipers don’t always match the rain’s fury. It drives me crazy. Just having non adjustable wipers on my van is ok, but on my car I’m constantly adjusting the intermittent wipers…. I’m never satisfied.

Now they have rain sensing wipers. You would think this would be great, but alas it’s not. Now when the rain doesn’t match the wipe speed ( and being human, my perception is that it doesn’t, whether it does or not) you can’t do anything about it other than turning on the regular wipers. It’s up to the computer, not you.

Maybe vacuum wipers aren’t so bad…

greg

11/5/08
We just got a load of nine new Saabs… our lot has been empty for the last 3 weeks for the changeover, but now they’re rolling out. Now all we have to do is sell them, I hope Obamo winds up the economy!

But this post isn’t about that… It’s about quality control. All carmakers have made giant strides in the last 10 years, but especially in quality control. I checked in these 9 cars we got this morning, looking for damage and any initial problems. How many problems did we have. None. And normally we usually don’t have any problems. They all started, everything worked.. and nothing was falling off of them. The truck driver didn’t even scratch anything.

It wasn’t like that back in the eighties when I started working on Saabs. They would flood trying to start them. They rattled, stuff was left off, and when you prepped a car that was sold, you had to literally tighten all the bolts under the car! And the quality of a European car was much better than American cars of the time. Those guys in Chevy dealers were putting water pumps on cars before they were sold.

I guess it was the Japanese who brought everyone’s game up. It’s a good thing too. It’s a pleasure to watch traffic go by and not see a rusty fender in the bunch.

greg

Poor Ben… He’s was our clean up guy and all around gopher at a Cincinnati Saab Dealership. Now he’s our parts guy, parts manager, the whole works. He’s been a parts guy for 2 days now.

There isn’t that much to being a parts guy, other than looking up the right part, producing it from a giant bin of shelves, and getting the right price logged onto the right program in the computer. So far he hasn’t done so good, but on day 2, who can complain?

I started fixing cars straight out of the Army in ’73. I needed a job and saw one in the paper. ‘Mechanic needed, will train’. I had a small toolbox and a couple of hand tools, all the other guys in the shop had towering tool boxes with thousands of dollars worth of tools in them. They gave me a lift, pulled a car on it and said “fix it”.

I did and have been doing it ever since. The same will happen with Ben. He might stay with it and might not, but the training will all be the same.

greg

In the 20’s Harry Miller built the most beautiful and fast racing cars of the era… won Indy at least 9 times, and Miller’s spiritual offshoot, Offenhauser went on to do more of the same, dominating American open wheeled racing, until the 60’s.

One of these cars is being restored down the road from our shop at Zakira’s. It’s really hard to say if this car is restored or new, as they have all Millers plans and jigs for the car. When it’s done, it will be just as entered at Indy in 1922, but what a work of art. It’s hard to believe you drive this thing, it should be on a wall at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The pic above is the engine sitting in the Machine Tool room getting done up.

It’s no wonder Harry Miller went out of business in the 30’s. He spent way too much time making this thing look good.

greg

A hot engine in the winter is your friend,
In the summer, it?s your deadly enemy?..

Cars won?t go away till they?re fixed?

What breaks on cars these days is on the molecular level,
And I can?t see down that far?

It takes 10 years to get some idea of what you are doing..
And 20 years to get good at it?

You have to find out for yourself what the customer screwed up on his car?
He won?t tell you?

10,000 miles or more is too long to go on an oil change?
No matter what the manufacturers insist on?
(Your engine won?t blow up till it?s out of warranty?)

The cars engine compartment never gives back a dropped tool?

If you drop a small part on the floor that parts doesn?t have?
You won?t find it for 3 days

You can?t teach a guy not to break plastic parts (such as dash trim)
It?s a learned skill?

You?re gonna get cut and bloody?
But you do get good at getting blood out of upholstery..

Rust never sleeps?

greg

In my last blog on this subject, 2009 VW ROUTAN.. Sheep in Wolfsburg clothing?, this whole rebadging thing has been bugging me. I work in a European car (Saab) dealership and here is how I see what this means to them.

The mechanics that work there have probably been doing VW’s for most of their working lives. There are some gypsy mechanics , but for the most part, you make the best money when you know the product well, and that usually takes years. These guys are immersed in VW culture, including how their manuals are written and how their tools work.

Now, here comes the Chrysler minivan…. along with it comes a huge pile of tools (none of which work on their normal cars) and computer manuals (none of which translates to how they have learned to do things) and scan tools (none of which will also work on their normal cars, or even work the same).

So now these guys are the guys that are going to service your new minivan. They obviously have mechanical skills or they wouldn’t be working there. So they will get rushed training to quickly get up to speed, and here comes the new minivan on friday at 4:50 pm with a check engine light on, and a customer who wants it taken care of quickly and be on his way. Good Luck!

So, in the end, this minivan thing will go on for a few years, it will never really generate enough sales to keep it going, and VW and Chrysler will eventually drop it. The few cars that they made will drift back to Chrysler dealers or independents to be fixed. If there is a market for a VW minivan, and they engineered their own, it could have been a contender…

greg

Rat rods are the latest thing in hot rods. A return to the pure roots of hot rodding, when guys on a shoestring tried to make their heaps go faster and look cool. This could even be considered a lifestyle. Low buck.. cutting and welding is just your time. The rougher the better. Check out more rat rods in the gallery…

The Pumpkin Run is the premier street rod show in southern ohio… The Clermont county fairgrounds are swamped with a bewildering variety of iconic American art. And you can drive it to…
See you there.. Oct 3,4 and 5th…

greg