Hello Everyone,
I've been working in the auto industry longer than I care to think about, and I'm the one doing all the diagnostics in our shop. I've been following the use of Pressure transducers to help diagnose since it came on the scene. I must say that I've been rather skeptical, and have yet to jump on the band wagon. I just took a two day refresher course, and the instructor was giving pressure transducers the big thumbs up.
I'm looking for some more insight. Is it just a good way to prove what you already know? Or can you really use it to help diagose cars? I see many posts where people are disabling a cylinder to show the changes in waveform generated. I keep thinking it is much easier to make observations when you already know where the problem lies. Can you really glean usable insight when the problem is not already known?
I just got access to a FirstLook for an extended period of time to play with. I know I can't directly connect to a cylinder, but I'm hoping connecting to the exhaust, and intake will give me an idea if this can really be used to help in Diagnostics. I would love to be able to get a glimpse into the mechanics of the engine without having to start pulling things apart. I've seen quite a few engines where a compression test looks good. But when we did a leak down test we end up finding a bad valve. And sometimes even that isn't enough. A broken valve spring might not be shown with that test either. It would only be us knowing that a problem existed in that cylinder, and doing a tear down that we would find things like the valve spring, or worn cam lobe, etc,.. Can you really see these things with pressure transducers?
I'm going to give it a try for a while, but really just wondered what others thought.
Thanks,
Marcello