My real name is Richard McCuistian.  I'm 51 years old with a daughter and two sons, and from those three I have six grandchildren ranging from newborn to 12 years old.  I teach automotive in the applied technology division of LBW Community College here in South Alabama.

I worked for more than a quarter of a century pulling wrenches and chasing sparks. Early on I became well acquainted with the world of oil, grease, gasoline, and high-speed steel; when I went as a very small boy to spend the day at my dad’s shop, I didn’t take any toys.  I played with steel ball bearings, creepers a soldering iron, and an oil squirt can. As I stood on a wooden stool at the age of five in my dad’s shop melting solder and watching it drop in shiny blobs onto that greasy wood and looking out the open window over a peanut field, I was developing a way of thinking that was new to my pristine young mind and would set the course of my life.  It was the early ‘60s.

It was around 1971 when I built a dune buggy out of junk VW parts and an engine my dad put together and drove it up and down miles of narrow, tree-lined red clay dirt roads with no driver’s license.  Those early experiences and the time I spent with my dad at his shop planted lifelong memories deep inside me. I still remember (and love) the smells and sounds of a busy garage, and I haven't ceased to enjoy the crisp, familiar clicking of a ratchet in the hands of an automotive craftsman, the hammering of impact wrenches, the feel and the smell of hand cleaner and hydrocarbons, new tires and kerosene, and the purr and roar of engines… These and dozens more are peaceful sounds and smells to a guy with my roots. I pumped 40 cent a gallon gas at a Gulf station in Level Plains Alabama for awhile, built some engines, replaced clutches, burned out lights, and tinkered with carburetors and ignition systems on old vehicles.  My first rebuild was a straight six in a '61 Ford pickup.  My first American vehicle was '55 Chevy pickup, which was later replaced by a 63 Corvair Spyder.  By the time I was 20 years old, I had owned probably 15 VW beetles (my dad ran a one-man VW shop).

Electronic ignition was brand-new when I started out, and every seasoned mechanic from that era that I knew hated it. It required a whole new way of thinking about ignition systems. In time, electronic ignition lost its shroud of mystery and I reached the point where I had replaced at least as many modules and pole pieces as I had points and condensers.  Then Chrysler decided to hang that crazy Lean-Burn brain box on the side of the air cleaner and built the ignition module into it, thoroughly confusing everything with yet another new way of thinking.  And it wasn’t over yet. Not by a long shot.

By late 1981, with only a half-dozen years as a professional mechanic under my belt, I had attended my first real school. It was a two-day General Motors training session on Computer Command Control in Houston, Texas where I learned the basics of GM’s new Electronic Engine Controls from a female instructor who was one of the sharpest mechanics that I had ever encountered.  Ms. Smith taught us all about closed loop fuel control, and feedback carbs, and gave us some interesting tips on troubleshooting GM’s HEI that a lot of guys still don’t know about.

Ford had forged ahead of GM in one luxury car line by equipping Lincolns with throttle body fuel injection, but I wasn’t to discover that system until another three years had passed.
           
            By 1984, I was working for a Mazda/VW dealer and had attended factory schools in Jacksonville Florida on electrical and advanced fuel control systems on both makes.  Some of the things I learned the hard way in the field but had never fully understood began to fall into place.  I found that the holes in my understanding were suddenly being filled with pieces I had been missing for so many years. As I assimilated the new information, I adopted a whole new view of the industry and with it another whole new way of thinking.

Electronic Fuel Injection had become the order of the day on most vehicles by the mid-eighties, with the dull whine of electric fuel pumps coming from once-silent fuel tanks, and the first two things I found myself reaching for quite often were new additions to my toolbox, namely a high pressure fuel gauge and a “scan tool.”  In a world of constantly changing rules and vanishing carburetors, I was deep into yet another whole new way of thinking. 

My dad had been working on Bosch electronic fuel injection since 1968, when VW released it on their Type 3 platform, but for me, EFI was a new dragon to be tamed.  I was working at a Lincoln Mercury dealer when I discovered Ford’s early EEC systems, with their crank sensors, strange rotor alignment procedures, and non-adjustable timing.  The Variable Venturi carburetor was an interesting way to handle fuel delivery, but I was more interested in the new thinking it would require to master Ford’s Electronic Engine Control system.  I was beginning to get the big picture and I had the idea that a guy who really understood  fuel injection could fix most cars without using those annoying trouble trees and shop manual matrixes.

Now I was up to my ears in Hall effect units, thermistors, and potentiometers, pulse width modulated outputs, etc. but I was loving every minute of it. I had managed to catch up with the industry and for a while I thought I was abreast of every change, at least in the Ford vehicle lines.  But there were other electronic systems that had nosed their way in. 

I was facing new challenges in non-engine related electronics systems like Programmmed Ride Control, Variable Assist Power steering, and Electronic Air Suspension, which could really give some interesting problems.  Somebody up the pipeline coined a new term, and these types of systems were dubbed “Vehicle Dynamics” in some of the literature I was reading.  Electronically controlled transfer cases were a viable option in some vehicles and represented a new way of thinking in that arena, while we all were scrambling to keep up.

I found that eighties vintage 4-wheel antilock brake systems worked fine until problems developed in high mileage vehicles, shocked customers turned down thousand-dollar estimates, and many once-expensive models were cruising the highways with their ABS lights obscured by duct tape or a picture of a girlfriend. 

By the time 1986 came and went, I had been schooled and certified in EEC systems specializing in vehicle electronics and driveability at the volume Ford dealer where I was to work for the next decade and a half.  I tried in vain to use Ford’s H manual to fix some of the tougher problems for a week or two after I came back from EEC certification school, and when I finally put the manual back on the shelf and started measuring voltages and resistances on every car that came in, I started satisfying customers and fixing cars right.  Ford service engineers adopted my method of checking sensors a couple of years later.  Apparently I wasn’t the only one who was frustrated with the old H manual, but I had developed my own methods through a new way of thinking… again.

Adaptive learning became a new item programmed into Electronic Engine Controllers to deal with product variability in the field, and it was initially confusing when I replaced a faulty part with a new one only to have the vehicle run worse. Once again, a new way of thinking and a new set of rules had to be adopted.  What complicated matters for many technicians was that some manufacturers (like Chrysler) didn’t even mention adaptive learning in their literature and we had to find out the hard way that if you snatched the battery cable off for a half an hour so the controller would lose it’s bad data entries and stop trying to use the old figures to compensate for a problem that was no longer there.

For several years I was the only driveability guy my dealership had, and I settled into a routine of working out 12 to 15 cars a day.  I didn’t have time to sell tune-ups; I was too busy getting rid of black smoke, bucking and jerking, no-starts EGR surges, MIL lights, etc., and I got pretty good at it.  God only knows how many oxygen sensors I replaced. 

My dealership bought the Jeep franchise in 1987, and my service manager sent me to Atlanta about six or seven times that year for week-long schools on Jeep and Renault fuel injection and electronics systems.    As one decade rolled into the next, I saw electronics beginning to take root in transmissions and braking systems. Speedometer cables were beginning to disappear on many vehicle lines, with drum-driven speedos replaced first by digital, then electronic analog units.  I found more than a few instrument clusters redesigned to contain complex computers that receive gauge, tach, and speed information over a multiplex network.  Replacement cost on some instrument cluster units approaches the sticker price of a nice laptop PC.

I was interested to read that Chrysler had interfaced their cruise control on some vehicle lines with their electronic transmission shift strategy to prevent shift hunting when the cruise was engaged in hilly country.  They called it “fuzzy logic” in the Master Tech training literature,.  It made sense to do that, since we got a lot of complaints from customers about shift hunting with cruise engaged, but it was another new way of thinking.  Some computerized auto transmission strategies were de-torquing the engine the moment of each shift to eliminate the crisp-feeling gear change of bygone years. The interesting thing about this new way of handling old characteristics is that if I hadn’t read about it I never would have discovered it on my own. That’s the way more and more new strategies are.  They silently take over and change our world from inside the clusters of electronic boxes that surround us.

Remote Keyless Entry was a particularly interesting option that became more common on newer vehicles than not, and I had to learn new procedures every couple of years concerning the programming of keyless fobs.  

On the service engineering front, the big three automakers spent fortunes on projects producing highly advanced computerized diagnostic machines to interface with vehicles that were sprouting electronics systems comparable to those found on military fighter jets.  The most useful diagnostic tool that came as standard equipment with these units was the capability to attack intermittents by installing a small electronic box that would communicate with the PCM, letting the customer make a data recording when the intermittent concern reared its ugly head.  The recording was downloaded to the big machine back at the shop and the data could be interpreted to see what was going on. These recorders were to become my most useful diagnostic tools for driveability concerns, particularly on hard-to-find intermittent problems.  But using the tool and reading the graphs it produced required (you guessed it) a whole new way of thinking...  again.  Merely understanding the vehicle wasn’t good enough any more.  I now had to learn to interpret data from diagnostic machines that cost more than my house. 

Passive anti-theft systems had appeared early on GM cars, with resistor-coded keys and accompanying modules designed to foil would-be thieves.  Then more sophisticated systems began to appear in the mid-90’s, which called for another change in thought patterns and the development of new troubleshooting techniques.

Passive anti-theft systems are all too familiar to most techs nowadays, but in those early years (96/up), getting the hang of the way those systems opererated was quite a challenge.  It wouldn't have been so bad if Ford had made one system for all their vehicles, but that simply wasn't the case.

This was particularly annoying when using the scan tool to code new keys, since I had to remember which module contained the PATS function, and it changed ever new model year.  Some PATS modules are stand-alone, some are built into the instrument cluster, and some were integrated with the PCM.  Replacement PATS keys generally cost twenty dollars or so, and the Passive anti theft system has to be programmed to receive the new electronic key and told whether or not to dump the old ones.  Other manufacturers call their versions of this system by different names and key-coding procedures vary.

By the late ‘90’s, on-board computers were becoming more and more routine handling functions once managed by multiple modules.  Speedometer calibration and 4x4 functions have migrated to within the mysterious confines of these black boxes.  With many new electronic modules, data from the old module has to be transferred to the new one after replacement, or speedometers won’t read properly and warning lights will remain illuminated.  Some vans have modules controlling the electrical systems front end and other modules controlling the rear end electrical systems.

As the ‘90’s continued to whistle by, ignition distributors disappeared in favor of coil packs and finally coil-on-plug ignition, and the ignition module was moved away from the bulkheads, fender wells and radiator supports to be nestled in the solid state confines of the Engine Controllers on many vehicles while federal regs settled into place that called for a standardization of terms, data link connectors, and trouble codes.  Another whole new set of electronic sensors, programs, and systems was put in place to make sure the emission control systems were doing their jobs.  Boy, talk about a new way of thinking!  Previously we had foreground managers in the controller that handled stuff like fuel control and spark timing and background managers that handled stuff like EGR and canister purge, but now we had a “big brother” overseer manager that made sure everything else was performing according to government standards! 

The Processor, ECM, ECA, SBEC, etc. was re-dubbed “Powertrain Control Module” (obviously destined to be designated the “PCM”), and many other terms were standardized by federal mandate between automakers.  With the new regs, we picked up a new oxygen sensor in the pipe behind the catalyst for the purpose of checking oxygen storage capacity.  Another new idea produced by the ever-tightening federal standards was that fuel tank pressure is to be monitored, checked, and re-checked by the PCM to make certain there are no leaks larger than a pinhole in the evaporative system or fuel tank. “Smoke machines” have become the order of the day for finding pinhole leaks. 

Misfires are carefully monitored to the point of being a nuisance, since the PCM can sometimes detect an extremely mild misfire and pop on the annoying MIL even though there are no noticeable problems.  Still, there are other times when a really nasty misfire can occur without setting a single trouble code, but if a misfire is serious enough, some PCM programs will shut the injector down, confusing driveability techs into thinking the injector circuit is the cause of the problem when it is actually an effect.  Powertrain Control Module reprogramming fixes are engineered by the manufacturers for many of the problems encountered in the field nowadays. There was a time when we used vacuum restrictors, delay valves, and revised emission or ignition parts to make the necessary changes.

The reliable old diesel pickup engine remained unchanged until electronic diesels shattered the comfortable world of the light diesel mechanic by providing still another deep and powerful new way of thinking in truck engines.

As we roll into the new millennium, the bulky computerized diagnostic machines in most dealership service bays have been honed down, reprogrammed, and redesigned for a new century. Many handheld scanners now have more power and storage capacity than the early desktop PC’s, and the PCM is required to take a snapshot of ten or twelve different items when any parameter wobbles out of line far enough and long enough to trigger a trouble code.  It was a welcome new way of thinking that made this information available to independents as well as dealership personnel. Now scan tools are being replaced by laptops with special adapters and software.

Still the levels of sophistication continue to increase.  Some models have sensors in the rear bumper to alert the driver when a collision is imminent during reversing maneuvers.  Global Positioning Systems are showing up on more expensive models now, along with the capability to manipulate and control vehicle electronics with a satellite downlink.  Would it be too far fetched to think that manufacturer satellite links might one day be checking emissions and programming our PCM’s as we drive down the highway?  I don’t think so.  All it takes is a new way of thinking… again. 

Since January 2001 I've been teaching automotive at a small technical college, and the challenges have been numerous, to say the least. I've recertified the program twice through NATEF in the past eight years.

Hopefully I can continue to provide able-bodied entry-level guys to the local shops, parts stores, and dealerships.  That's my mission.

R.W.M.

What area of the automotive sector do you work in?
Teaching Automotive