Schneider's World: The old guy in the office

Jan. 1, 2020
It seemed straightforward enough: a late model, relatively high mileage Toyota truck with a significant shudder on steady, light acceleration, generally at speed. Then the "old guy" got involved.

It seemed straightforward enough: a late model, relatively high mileage Toyota truck with a significant shudder on steady, light acceleration, generally at speed.

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Sure, it could be any one of a number of problems complicated by the fact the shudder was often preceded by a lighter, higher frequency buzz or vibration that felt almost like driving over gravel, but I’ll bet you were already well on your way to working your way through a mental list of all the usual suspects. I know our service writer was, and so was the tech assigned to the truck.

It could have been a misfire, but it wasn’t. No Check Engine/Service Engine Soon MIL.

It could have been the back of the extension housing grounding against the cross member as described in Technical Service Bulletin T-SB-0132-08, but sadly we knew for certain it wasn’t, because replacing the mount didn’t change a thing.

(This may be a bit out of context, but am I the only one who finds it a bit ironic that the one time you finally succeed in getting your technician to look at the technical service literature before they begin a repair and then act on what they’ve found, it’s the one time that what they’ve found fails to fix the problem, as opposed to the dozens of times they fail to check, and the fix would have been right there in front of them saving countless hours of anxiety and aggravation if only they had looked.)

Well, that’s what happened to our line guy, and he passed the Toyota truck over to our drivability guy. But not before they both drove the vehicle with one monitoring the scan data and the other forcing the vehicle to symptomize.

Unfortunately, they were only partially successful. They managed to duplicate the symptoms on an almost reliable basis, but couldn’t get a handle on what was causing the problem. Having run out of alternatives, my drivability guy did the only thing that seemed reasonable at the time: he went and dragged the “old guy” (read: me) in the office out of the office to ride with him.

I have surrounded myself with a very talented group of professionals. They are all very good at their respective specialties, which means dragging the “old guy” out of the office and into or under a car doesn’t happen anywhere near as often as it once did — anywhere as often as I would probably like it to.

I say that because once upon a time I was pretty good at this kind of thing and one of the reasons I think I got pretty good at it was because the “\old guy” I dragged out of the office (my dad) was pretty good at carving a problem up into digestible chunks. He created discernable differences that tended to eliminate systems and/or components. It was a process of: “In this… Then, that’s” that almost always resulted in a successful diagnosis.

We tag-teamed the vehicle: me driving and my drivability guy watching the scanner. And, even though I was able to deliver the precise set of symptoms exactly as described by the vehicle’s owner on demand, we were still unable to isolate the cause. At least, not until I moved the shift handle from fully automatic D5 to manually controlled Drive 4 and realized the symptom went away. That’s when we had both the validation and confirmation we were looking for.

Of course, we confirmed the confirmation with a number of other tests and inspections, as well as a call to Identifix. But, in the end we were certain we had isolated a flex shift problem internal to the transmission.

It was one of those rare moments a problem in the present triggered a whole series of sweet memories from a not so distant past that reminded you of just what it felt like to stand triumphant over the machine, what it felt like to find it so you could fix it.

How many of you reading this can relate? How many have come back from a road test smiling because you knew. You knew what was wrong, you knew what was causing the problem and because you figured it all out – you knew you could fix it.

How many of you have thought to yourself there are times when being the “Old guy in the office…” isn’t all that bad after all!

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