Automotive Troubleshooting! The Right Way!

Hi, welcome back to Charlie's Garage. I wanted to show you guys something right here. So we got the 68 Mustang up on a lift. We're underneath it and we're taking a look right here is where the header meets the exhaust pipe right. So what I wanted to show you guys was the uh these bolts right here because I know the focus is pretty bad but it's kind of a weird angle here but these uh bolts are all super loose in here all three of them so uh and I want to explain to you guys why that's important after I tighten them up. So let me uh tighten these up offline and I'll get back with you guys and explain kind of why it was I wanted to show this to you. All right so those bolts have been tightened up now but the reason why it was important that I show it to you is I wanted to talk about trouble or proper troubleshooting procedures or diagnostics right. So um with those three bolts loose in there when the engine was running and vibrating those bolts were just pinging around inside that hole and it was making a much higher tapping noise right and I it took me a while to get it in here to get it thick so I drove it to a couple places with that tapping um drove it here with the tapping for a few days and I've been all over the place with it really and I've had everybody from completely inexperienced technicians to full-on master certified automotive technicians all jumped to the same conclusion that the problem with that noise was that it was coming from the and I had one guy who was like let's just take the valve cover off right now and look at it and it was always kind of funny because I already knew what the noise was but I just kind of wanted to see what other people would say or think so I could give an idea of where people stood with their troubleshooting right. Um when you're troubleshooting or diagnosing something you never want to skip a step right. The first step in diagnosing or troubleshooting is always to verify the concern if possible. That's easily done with this one you start the engine and you immediately hear the beeping right. The problem was occurring with the second step which is a complete and thorough visual inspection right. A complete thorough visual inspection and we say visual inspection but really it's a touch feel inspection too right. So if I had heard that noise prior to knowing what it was my first step would have been to be feeling around in that area of the engine where the noise was coming from looking for loose bolts and stuff before I start pulling valve covers off and messing with valve adjustments. So uh this is just a quick tip for those of you out there getting into the field or are in the field and just starting out is to never jump to a conclusion right. Follow the steps of a good troubleshooter. Verify the concern that the driver had. Make sure that it exists. See if you can recreate it and then proper visual inspection. Sometimes the littlest things can get turned into the biggest things by people who do not follow proper troubleshooting procedures. You end up dismantling a whole engine just to find out that right. So not that you know all the people who said maybe it's the valves were all eager to jump right into the valve cover. Some of them probably would have if I'd given them the car and said fix it would have put it up on a lift and got up underneath there and felt around first. But there were a few of them that were ready to just completely jump on my engine with wrenches and start dismantling it. So it makes me a little bit concerned about some of these people. But good news is here at the school we've got people who are smart enough and a few of them identified it right away and helped me get up on the lift and get it fixed. So now we can drive the Mustang around with no annoying tap noise. So that's really good. The other thing I noticed while the Mustang was up on the lift was a whole bunch of camber on the right front tire and very little to no camber on the left front tire. So camber if you look at your two tires and they're pretty straight but they're leaning in and out like this that's camber. So one tire is you know dead on straight and the other one's like this. So that had me a little concerned. So luckily we got a class that's learning how to do front end alignments right now. So I'm going to have the instructor hook up the portable alignment machine and take a look at it. Let me know what's going on. But thank you for watching this. I just kind of you know preaching the choir to a lot of you who already know this. But for those of you that are starting out very key thing never forget the obvious. You know keep it simple stupid. Do the obvious things first. Never skip a step. All right electrical don't be a guy that doesn't check the fuse before he starts pulling apart electrical components right. You know work the troubleshooting process and you won't go wrong. So again thank you for watching. Just a couple weeks ago I did a video for 200 subscribers. I'm going to have to do one here pretty quick for 400 subscribers. The channel is growing very quickly. I'm very happy about that. Eventually when this channel starts making money I can funnel some of that back into some of the school projects and make even more videos and cooler stuff. So look forward to later this week we're going to be posting more about the Honda project and we're going to start doing some work on the 55 Dodge project. So some more videos coming forward in the next couple of days to a week. So thank you. Please like and subscribe. Share the channel. Spread the news that we're having fun out here right. So if you there's anything you want to let me know and I'll try to do a quick video on it for you. Thanks. Have a good one.