Miscommunication

well welcome to another Monday morning I hope you guys are going to have a good week this week and I just want to talk a little bit some just about everybody has dealt with issues regarding communication either from service advisors or customers or your service manager Parts man or whoever but poorly written work orders can cause even the most competent technician a lot of grief if you don't have all the information you might wind up working a long time on something like for example when somebody describes a noise and they don't use the right words somebody that's chasing that noise might find a noise that they think is the noise the person is talking about but it turns out the customer will say no I wasn't even talking about that noise I was talking about this other noise that happens at this other time so you've already burned two hours fixing a noise that wasn't the noise they were complaining about I've run into that myself and it's a little bit annoying because you've done all that work you see but that's why clear communication needs to be you know drive the car with the customer that's exactly what it is you want me to pick you may hear stuff that you don't like that you would fix if it was your car that they're not even bothered with and so you always need to make sure you Vector in on what they're complaining about because they're the one paying the bill but you know the the you could say rotate tires you know change oil that kind of stuff that's pretty straightforward uh you know replace fuel filter blah blah but there are also times when the service advisors at the place where I used to work anyway before I you know left and went to teaching was they would the work would be coming in so fast they'd be having to write the work orders they don't want to keep customers waiting a long time and there was questions that customers I mean questionnaires customers were supposed to fill out for intermittent concerns and all that and of course also the service advisors toward the end here and have gotten where they would walk around the car and take pictures of it from every angle and attach that to the file in the computer so if the customer came back and said hey this Dent or this scratch wasn't on my car before you know if they see a cigarette burn on the seat they take a picture of that before anybody's ever got in the car because sometimes customers will come back and say hey they burned my seat with a cigarette I want a new seat blah blah blah blah and all that kind of thing I've seen that but anyway uh this one here was kind of funny uh I didn't draw this ticket but another guy in the shop did and it said windshield won't separate rain from water what what is what does that even mean I mean what are you supposed to do with that information and the guy that wrote it was a pretty good service writer he was just sort of adult and he had a lot of stuff going and he wrote down something that didn't even make any sense and when you're the technician and you look at this work order you think what am I supposed to do about this you know that just wasn't funny but this other one that was totally amazing to me was there was this uh service advisor that I worked with there was four service advisors out there and we got tickets from various ones of them and this guy's name was Curtis and he brought me this I mean I drew a ticket from the dispatch office that had you know they got repair lands on them like a repair one repaired with a tutoring and then whenever you're charging out the parts you need to tell the parts room which repair line you're charging out the part for so they can annotate that for this part was supposed to fix this problem Etc but this one here the very first repair line and this was a warranty ticket said you have to turn on the left turn signal before the engine will start and the unit won't start unless left turn signal it starts on I said man that is an interesting problem I've never heard of that in my life and so I go to digging around looking around you know checking to find out why this is like this and I spent about 30 minutes tracking it and took some of the you know Dash I mean the steering column covers off and all that and I found out they had deliberately wired it up this way as a their idea of an anti-theft device so even if somebody had the key they weren't likely to turn on the left turn signal before they started the car and so I go out to the service Rider and I said Curtis why did you put this up here on the first repair line if the customer has wired it up this way he says oh I just wanted I put that on there so you would know how to start it and I'm thinking why in The Sound Hill didn't you put a sticky note on the ticket or something instead of putting it on a repair line you know which was the dumbest thing you know he could have basically made a some kind of an annotation on there saying information only or whatever customers wired it up this way but see the communication that cost me some work because he actually put it on there like it was something that was supposed to fix the dumbest thing but anyway I can tell you a lot of stories about that not in um this was one a different service router wrote this one up and I could do a whole presentation on this one I'm out one day but another mechanic Drew this ticket and it had an ABS light you know we just saw that fairly regularly on some of these late you know mid 90s Rangers and this was one of the ones that would actually store codes you know some of the earlier rear wheel any like brake system put in store codes and uh so he pulled up I don't know code 12 or whatever it was and that typically indicated that there was a problem with the um fluid level switch on the reservoir and so we couldn't just get the switch then you had to get the whole Reservoir which didn't cost that much anyway um and he went ahead and replaced the reservoir which is what he always did for that problem cleared the code drove it around checked it out brought it back turned in the ticket the customer came to pick it up and he hadn't gone anywhere before he wheeled right back in to the right up area and then he the service courses service advisor whenever a situation like that arises I get called out there even though I didn't even work on it and so he says uh he said this guy says that his vehicle is not fixed and you know so and so Sam or whatever his name is put a reservoir So I says well what's the deal they think this is what the deal is he says everything's fine you don't ever see the ABS light until you match the park break and then the red ABS light the red brake light comes on in the yellow ABS light comes on and then when you pop the um part break off the red brake light goes out but the ABS light stays on see that was not even laid out on the ticket it just basically said ABS light comes on sometimes and so who's going to think to match the park break you know maybe I'll talk about that when I show you guys some schematics in a later video but uh that was another one where communication you know sort of fell on his face but um I had written the motor range article about this it's kind of funny and when it came out in the magazine the magazine was being passed around the service department and all and the service writer came out there in a huff and he says the way you wrote this article it makes it sound like this was all my fault I said well it kind of was because you didn't get all the information from the guy or if you did you didn't put it on the repair order that service writer was always a little bit he was funny anyway he was a good service Rider but he didn't like to admit when he made mistakes and the uh one day I was riding with the shop foreman because he would always for a while he had to drive a lot of the vehicles we worked on to make sure they were okay before we turned in the ticket and all it was some kind of an issue that the service manager made that ruling that for the next six weeks it's her the shop foreman is going to you know test drive each car with you and all that he's always supposed to do it after you've had a repeat repair and I saw this servers I mean the shop form an essays what you're doing is what's called quality control and he kind of liked the sound of that and so he went and had a red a stamp made that said QC in big letters and then it had little lines down here about where he was supposed to sign off on it and so every time we would get a repeat repair ticket the service router would stamp QC on it with that big red stamp and oh they love doing that they'd stamp one of those and give it to back to the mechanic that worked on it whether it was his fault or not and it was one of those things that were when you know you did everything you could to fix it right and they cheerfully hand you because they had by that time they had the you turn your tickets into the regular dispatcher but they had the service writers dispatching tickets to each to their group of mechanics and the service writers just really liked handing you those because they knew that it kind of ticked you off a little bit you get this little anger Spike when you get one of those because that means you got to disengage from whatever else you're doing and figure out what happened here and um sometimes it was a mechanic's fault sometimes it wasn't but one day the service advisor the same service advisor that wrote this one up made a mistake of some kind of riding the ticket you know I enjoyed catching him in a mistake as much as he enjoyed catching me and so uh I took his QC stamp and I put a little sticky note up there on the ticket and I stamped it that sticky note QC and then above that I wrote service advisor QC you made a mistake and whenever I handed him that that was so funny to me he angrily jerked the sticky note off and he winds it up written his teeth and he throws it in the trash and I said now you know how it feels to get with it I still get tickled every time I think about that well this Dodge Caravan came into the college over there 179 000 miles 3.3 liter engine in and all that and uh that the girl said you know and some of these customers have funny ways of saying things he says my van is Jank and when I drive I didn't think I would make it here you know well that's obviously a sort of a a word that was created between the I mean between jerk and yank I guess or something that's what she came out but I kind of figured out what she meant but I set one of my more seasoned students with the owner on a test drive and the student came back and says it's a surge but it only did it a couple of times kind of briefly and the code we pulled was for an inactive or slow O2 sensor which on a Chrysler can happen anywhere within the O2 sensors range and that on a Ford an O2 sensor will either be sluggish or it will Flatline or you know and it'll cause it to you know skew the fuel Trims and all that but only your Dodge us and Chryslers and these vintage ever since about I don't know 1988 telling up through the nannies now those oxygen sensors could fail just above the half volt which is a crossover the switch point you know from Rich to lean and they would fail at like you know 0.58 volts and just float along there and this is what I'm talking about the fuel trim responds to the oxygen sensor now what you'll notice here is that whenever the oxygen sensor voltage is going up the fuel trim voltage is going down all right and then whenever this oxygen sensor voltage Peaks out and starts back down the fuel trim starts going back up this is a Sawtooth pattern I created but that's what it looks like and this is short fuel trim now remember that long fuel trim is going to float around pretty close you know to zero if everything's like it's supposed to be so but if the short fuel trim for example like if the oxygen sensor is indicating lean fuel like if it's this is too lean the short fuel trim will go up and up and up and up it'll stay up in this area up here or if it's reading too rich it'll go down and stay in this area down here when it maxes out and the long fuel trim kicks in and it starts trying to make coarse adjustments to so that it can bring this short fuel trim back around zero so you may find your long fuel trim at like 25 percent oh you know minus 25 percent but you'll see your short fuel trim at zero because the long fuel trim has been able to make an adjustment to keep the thing in Spec where it's giving you clean exhaust emissions but you know you're it's having a twist everything out of but what happens on these and I've seen it on more than one of these Chrysler Dodge platforms that I've never seen it on anything else some of you other guys might have that thing fails just above the midpoint of this switch the short fuel trim goes down down as far as it can go and then the lone fuel trim tries to make a coarse adjustment but it realizes that that nothing is changing up here while it's doing what it's doing down here and what it does the way the algorithm is written it drops in and out of clothes Loop fuel control and that thing will buck and jerk and jump and sometimes I've actually had them where they would just about quit running because of a decked him oxygen sensor you do have something like this the 91 model Dodge truck that are as president of college drove pull that stunt and I wound up having to put an oxygen sensor on that one but then that took care of that but having your scan tool and being able to look at this now I will tell you that you can read your oxygen sensor with a scope but you cannot read the fuel trim with a scope you have to be looking at a scan tool it's a window into the PCM where you can watch that fuel trim work and uh whenever after every time I've seen this it's always been this bucking and jumping so first time I saw it I was using the Mopar diagnostic system you make a recording and come back and load it up and play it back you know all right but anyway so we found this that you know if this was something that we'd seen that would make it buck and Jank and jerk and all that and so we had verified a concern we had isolated the cause we gathered the data and we analyzed it we had prior experience or I did based on what was going to be causing this and we're looking at our scan tool screen we saw this going on we determine the necessary actions are correct it and we landed on the oxygen sensor now the the caveat was this girl was leaving the vehicle with us and she was going on a field trip with some of the other faculty I mean not faculty some of the others faculty and students to Montgomery Alabama and so she was gonna leave and I was going to put the key under the floor mat but she need she paid the bill before she left for what the oxygen sensors on cost I figured up the bill and just totaled up the bill and we went ahead and put it back together while she's gone on her um field trip on the bus up to Montgomery so when we thought we were done with this dog only um we went ahead and uh we drove it and the crazy thing about it was it didn't it developed another problem and I'll tell you about that in just a minute but you know talking about service advisors they don't like giving customers bad news and whenever they will come out there you know you do the best troubleshooting you can you get as close as you can to the complete diagnosis but until you start taking that thing apart there's other stuff that you won't find until you've done the first repair and that's why every shop manual that I've ever seen that has any kind of you know sense about it we'll say verify repair it always says verify repair now if you try to verify the repair and you find something else you're going to have to work on it somewhere but service advisors hated that they wanted to go to the customer and say this is all your car needs and you'll never even need so much as another oil change as long as you own the car and you'll never have any more trouble with it you'll never see another check engine light if you'll let us put this one part on there uh but when the service right and so you say well what we have on this one is such and such a part has failed and they'll say that's going to fix it right they always say it that way and you're thinking I don't know until I get this put on there and I'll have to check further they did not like that I don't know how many times I crossed up with one service writer after another one like about that so anyway so that you know the bad tithing situation goes and I've actually seen uh some service Riders um one time I went out there with to get a tempo and uh I didn't look at the tag on the key and I didn't look at the tag on that but the only Tempo I saw out there there was actually two but I didn't see the other one believe it or not I unlocked the door I might not have had to unlock the door anyway the key that I had in my hand started the wrong tempo it just happened to start the other car and based on the way the thing was written up and what it did whenever I backed up the engine stalled and uh I said wow and so I did my Diagnostics and it needed an engine controller this all went to the service advisor and I said this thing's gonna have to have an engine controller on it he installed when I was backing up and I checked it he said okay we'll put it on there so I got one from the parts room put it on there car was fixed everything was fine test drove it put it back wrote it up and then I realized I had fixed the wrong car and it was like 350 dollars you know parts and labor at the time so I went back to the service Rider and I said look I fixed the wrong car because I don't know what we're up to about that if this guy didn't want to you know the other owner doesn't want to pay the essay says that but the car that is the proper car all it needs is a throttle position sensor and it's only going to be 60 bucks you know for the part a little bit of Labor and he says since we gave him bad information to start with can we do this for free I says no we can't do it for free Curtis because the guy's already okayed 350 dollars you'll be really happy with 60 bucks plus a little bit of Labor so no he's going to pay this is ridiculous because he wanted to be the hero saying tell the guy you're not going to have to pay anything else I don't know how many times I saw this guy do it another thing all right this one here when we drove it this time around to verify the repair now we're seeing a flashing battery light and where this thing is cutting up so bad it won't even hardly run the alternator is not putting out the battery's trying to go dead while we're driving it barely did get back to the shop on it and this is probably what she was feeling but I got some questions about this that I'm talking about later um so she was expecting to get back from that trip jump off the bus get on her vehicle and drive it home so I had to find out from the student services people her cell phone number was and we had to get her on the phone and we had to say look this ain't fixed we're gonna have to work on it um I said I'm thinking there's an alternator issue here but anyway that's you know that was a dicey situation and I'll tell you how it turned out in a minute but first I want to talk about this 83 Renault that I worked on now this thing would cut up and cut off going down the road and when I went to school in Atlanta a whole bunch of times in 1988 and 89 right after we got the Jeep Renault franchise at our dealership um I would go in there and I would just put Time After Time After Time to school and the instructor addressed this kind of ignition module now the later one didn't have this but you notice this one here has a little vacuum diagram on everything he says if you can reach back here and he's talking about reaching right up under the module back here to where that potting is in the back of the module if you mash that potting with your fingers in the engine stalls then that module has got to be replaced and so I couldn't get it backed up I drove and drove it and finally checking it out in the service Bay I reached around behind the module and mashed the potting and the engine died just like that guy said I mean oh wow we learned about this it's cool so I put the module on there and uh there's 130 bucks or something like that so this guy took the car well he came back the next day and he said this car is still quitting and uh he said I need you to find out what's wrong with it because I don't think that module was you know what the problem was I said well that's you know that's what I found but anyway so I hooked my meter up to the crank sensor just on a whim and put in a meter where I could see it and when I was over down the road and it quit the crank sensor had gone dark now it wouldn't do that the previous day but it did do it with a customer and it did it with me this time but it wouldn't do it the previous time and I found what I thought was wrong you see I mean you can do everything as right as you know and still miss something anyway this guy drove away from there just absolutely certain that we had just thrown a part at it without even doing any diagnosis and if we had missed an Atlanta crank sensor was like 29 and I think we just gave him that and the replacement of that without another troubleshooting you know charge but anyway that's one of those situations where you try you know you're trying to do your very best you can do with the information you have and all that and this wasn't a communication issue it was the fact that the car wouldn't cooperate and everybody has done intermittent drivability Diagnostics understands how that works well almost charging system on this Caravan I said let's go ahead and see what's going on with that so we did a little teardown on it you can see how this works and I've always been interested in these Chryslers how they have the automatic shutdown related feeds the injectors and the engine controller also feeds the power to the field on the alternator and the generator field driver in the module engine control module is actually what decides how much you know it knows what a battery voltage is and everything so it works really well to do that and that's a pretty solid system really it's been around since the mid 80s as I remember on Chryslers but um anyway this uh I told her I said this thing needs 200 alternator and she said well I don't have any more money so I said okay so show you what we saw here the brushes were all it was was worn out that's real common on alternators over time they got a lot of miles on it the brushes on the alternator can fail and you can see what it does to the slip Rings I actually did a little bit of a piece for Motor Age on the Visteon people that do uh that rebuild alternators and starters and stuff and they were what they do is they measure these rings and they basically build them up where they're like brand new and get rid of this you know nonsense here they said and the Visteon guy told me when I was talking to him he said most alternator Rebuilders just throw a new set of brushes in there but we measure those slip rings and we measure a lot of other stuff that other alternator Rebuilders don't do you know that's when the last time I told you I got four rebuilt alternators from AutoZone that time I don't know how they are now but that was that time and uh but anyway the vistian guy told me about that but do you see where this brush here was worn out really bad it was the one that was here this one wasn't worn out quite so bad that was this one up here and so we went ahead and got some more another set of brushes in the Little Brush holder thing right here out of a another alternator that we had and we fixed it and got a room away and it tested over just fine but my question was why didn't she mention the battery lat or any dead battery problems when she first came in she's ridden with us on the first test drive and she verified that the surge was what we were supposed to be looking for next question maybe she hadn't noticed the flashing battery life or maybe it was a coincidental failure and those do happen was this truly an information disconnect or just a circumstantial landmine you know and I've talked about a little prayed phrase I coined about this kind of stuff where you step on something you didn't see that was there and it blows up in your face you know uh what do we do when we spent most of what somebody had in their checking account on a repair that we were sure was totally legit and this is something they needed but we find out they have another more expensive problem that keeps the car from leaving that kind of thing happens too customers are never happy about that but it's it's like you're sort of painting yourself into a corner and you know they kind of need to be told going in and there may be other stuff going on well this is one customer that was really happy with all the work that we had done for her and uh it was after I left the college and you know it went into retirement that she sent me this text with this picture of her odometer and we had done a lot of work over the years on her Honda and she says thanks to you the Hyundai and I made it thanks to you and she's got this 300 000 odometer and you know that's a satisfactory message to get from somebody well um this is the end of the video and I hope you guys have a great week and let's all be careful out there

Channel: McCuistian

Views: 407

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Id: c2ta7vjWO7Y

Length: 25min 45sec (1545 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 04 2023