May 2019

B ack in my day, the only sensor I had to worry about was what I called my Spidey-sense: If a car was in, and I had an approximate idea of the problem, I would just know, and know how to deal with it. If my Spidey-sense was tingling, I knew I was on the right track. Of course, that’s absolute nonsense. What I had was years, nay decades, of accrued experience and training. All this enabled me to make highly accurate educated guesses. As a result, it meant I had the knowledge on how to follow through to provide a solution for these problems. Spidey- sense sounds better though, and it certainly impressed the customers and everyone I knew in fact, apart from Mrs P, who what went into building up the knowledge. She was more impressed by that. Sensors of any kind, supernatural or not, spider-related or not, were my friends. Not so much these days however. The problem is now that everything on a car has a sensor. Actually that isn’t even the problem. It’s fantastic that everything has a sensor now. A car provides so much data these days. When you compare to the way we used to do things, it was often quite vague. Getting something right could be quite hit-and-miss, and you might need access to some technological voodoo to make the vehicle run right again. Today, all the data is there, and the issue is interpreting it, and then providing the correct solution. The real problem is when a sensor goes wrong. Picture this. You have a Seat Leon with a DPF that thinks it is not working properly, but everything is fine. It reads clogged, but it’s not clogged. You try everything you can think of, and you spend ages trying to fix it. Eventually, you find a broken wire, and you think you have succeeded, but then it still reads clogged. You start again, and having eliminated the wire you come to the last possible thing, the sensor, which turns out to be the wrong one completely. You then get the right one, cross-check everything and then it is all running right again. The customer remained very tight-lipped about how this sensor ended up in there. Some sort of bodged previous fix I guess. They were not a regular, but I have a feeling I may have gained their trust. Sensors are myriad across the car now, providing all that running data, and providing us with clues when things go south. However, if as in this case, some foolish person replaces a sensor for whatever reason without re-checking, you are just building up more, different problems to eliminate. The more they over-egg the soufflé, the more... oh I’m not a chef, I have no idea what happens when you do that, but I bet it’s bad. Also, if someone suggested it, I would call someone with a background in catering. The one thing I would not do is start cracking eggshells to see if I could exacerbate the issue. This is my point, if I have one: If you don’t know the answer to the problem, don’t just blindly ‘do’ in the hope that a solution will magically occur. Call an expert. Maybe get some technical advice from one of the many outlets open to our sector. That’s a short term solution. In the long term, make sure to keep up to date with methods and training. After all, with great power comes great responsibility... “MY ARTIE-SENSE IS TINGLING” 66 AFTERMARKET MAY 2019 TEABREAK: MEMOIRS OF A MOTOR MECHANIC www.aftermarketonline.net