Behind the Scenes at UTI's Hands-On Diesel Lab

All right, welcome to Universal Technical Institute's Diesel Engines Lab. So you can see what we do in the interest of space is we have the students disassembling and reassembling light duty diesel engines, medium duty diesel engines, Cummins, Internationals, and you can see that some of these engines are in various states of basically being put back together because they were in the last week of the course. So today they were learning how to torque down their cylinder heads, reinstall their overhead, and then do their overhead valve adjustments. So they learn about how to measure. They don't really cover everything in this class that they in like how to measure connecting your auto oil clearance and stuff like that because that's stuff they're taught in Intro to Engines. So this class really features and focuses on more of the diesel specific stuff, turbochargers, charge air coolers, diesel engine tune-ups, and overhead sets, stuff like that. And as you can see, none of these engines have batteries or anything like that, so these are non-running. These are basically disassemble, identify the components, learn how to test components, learn how to inspect them and find out if they're reusable or not reusable and so forth. The Diesel Fuel Systems Lab that I made the other video about is where they get the running diesels and learn how to do diagnostics on running diesels. We have an old Series 60 here that really has no value as far as a current training aid because you don't see too many of these around anymore, but it does give us a way to explain jake brakes and overhead camshafts and stuff, which none of the small ones that we work on do. They have a Caterpillar here too that they use for the transmissions and then when you get to this side of the lab, if this is the transmissions lab or the drive line lab, if you want to call it that, where they really kind of focus on 10 speeds and gearing and differentials. You know, they work on stacks and do a lot of stuff that honestly in the field I never did much of. In my fleet work, the most I ever really did on these was take the cover off and see if the cures were messed up and if they were, replace the transmission. So they learn a lot more here than a lot of people in the field get to do on a daily basis. But yeah, these two labs, the Diesel Engines Lab and the Transmissions Lab. And as you can see, I'm down here at the other end of the lab now and there's a projector for lab demos and you look all the way back down. It's a pretty big space, but there's so much training aid and equipment packed in here that it looks smaller than it actually is. The other improvement we have in this lab from what we've had in the past is that the lighting is so much better in here. The diesel area where we used to teach the Diesel Engines class was very dark and gloomy and we would have to open the overhead doors just to kind of get some light in the room. Whereas this is nice and well lit and makes life a lot easier when you're trying to see stuff. So yeah, this is it. This is where we teach Diesel Engines and where we teach Transmissions. If you have any questions about stuff we specifically teach or you're interested in UTI, just leave a question in the comments.