Quote:All I deal with now is product development for 2014 and it doesn't matter if we are on the dynos or on a Injector Rig all anyone cares about is these scope graphs.
Sean,
Please don't take this wrong.... I am quite convinced that your an excellent and caring educator. And that was quite a nice letter.
But product development and the normal repair facility are a bit different wouldn't you say? If this same graduate came to work for a new car dealer he would be in a difficult spot. Which is where the average indy will be in about 5 years or so when many of the extended warranties run out.
Every platform comes with all kinds of options. Flex fuel, active fuel management, variable valve timing, etc... You can't memorize them all nor gather "good" and "bad" waveforms for all of them.
On that I am assuming your giving scope instruction preeminance over scan data interpretation and useage. I gather that most of your students are not headed for product development. If they were, you might as well teach embedded programming. In the development job category, there is probably a greater need for that than for what your graduate is doing
There are different levels of engineering also, some don't spend much time with scopes at all. I have some special tech2 software that the calibrators that write the actual tech2 software use. Well, an older version anyway. It came from the guy in charge of that group at the time. He has also asked permission on more than one occasion to share some of the stuff located on a web site that I am involved with. Not with his neighbors, but the guys who develop the tools we use.
I am pretty sure you will take this wrong, as raining on your parade, but this is a rough business. I am where many of your students will be if not soon, in about 5 years.
I could very successfully solve problems day in and day out without a scope. But not without my tech2. I have also watched many of our ASEP graduate students do the same. Or my tech1 in the old days. It is a myth that those with only scanners in the old days were handicapped all that much. We just had to learn to read between the data frames.
I am always amazed at how many experienced techs will not tell caring instructors like yourself what I just did. This is a great place and Tom has a good program for learning ONE of the tools of the trade.
There is so much in the argument over the two tools (scanner and scope) that has been misrepresented and poorly argued. Take the idea of fast glitches being ignored by the PCM for instance. Those against that notion never differentiate between the types of signals and how they are processed. And there are similar mistakes on the other side too.
I write this for your other students....
I hope you take it as intended. Not to offend, but to put things in perspective. Shouldn't that letter, as nice as it was, have been a wakeup call?
Please consider that thoughtfully. What happens is we can get emotionally invested in concepts and ideas and it can blind us. I got over mine, and now I have 3 scopes and a GMM. Don't need them much, but when I do, I really do.