Don’t Let The Intermittent Issue Make You Go Crazy!
Hello everyone, sorry for such a long pause on our weekly blogs. Jarhead Diagnostics has going crazy, which brings me to my next point. We have a new employee Jeff Black, who is a Platinum Master Certified Hyundai technician, certified with Toyota and GM, and is on his way to be AES certified. So, look out for him, and the amazing things he will bring to the table.
This week’s tech tip comes in the form of diagnosing intermittent issues. As technicians, this type of issue can be the most frustrating and time-consuming issue. Because no matter what you do, if it’s not broke you can’t fix it. So, when you have one of these issues in your bay, you need to start with asking the proper questions to the customer.
1-How often does this happen?
2-What are you typically doing when this happens?
3- What is your driving style?
4- Are you able to recreate the issue?
5- Does this happen in the morning or after you have been driving for a while?
Asking these simple questions, or some similar to these will help you better understand how to reproduce the issue. When the customers answer, truly listen to them and try to read through the answers to see what is actually going on. Because you could get the customer thinking, which will unfold more information on how to recreate it. Because they might realize that it only happens when they visit Bobby first thing in the morning. And you find out that to get to Bobby’s house you must drive 45mph uphill while the engine is cold. So now you have great information on what you must do. Now you can drive uphill at 45mph on a cold engine to verify the concern.
Another thing you as a flat rate technician must realize, if the issue is extremely intermittent, you still need to make a paycheck. So, when you get these concerns, do your initial diagnostic process. If you cannot duplicate the concern grab another vehicle to work on. When you have down time or in a waiting period on one vehicle, you switch back to the intermittent issue vehicle. This way, you are doing you due diligence while still producing. This may be difficult to do at first if you are not use to working on more than one vehicle at a time. But it is something you need to get use to.
On one last note, know when the throw in the towel. Sometimes you just cannot recreate the issue. After you have spent the time with an honest effort, sometimes you just have to wait until the issue gets worse. When I was a technician at one of the Kia dealerships, I had one with an intermittent rattle in the right front of the vehicle. I spent hours trying to recreate this, and never could. Come to find out the only time the noise would occur was on a cobble stone road somewhere in the D.C. area (which is roughly 10 hours from my location). No road gravel/dirt/rough in our area would make the noise. So, on this one, we informed the customer we could not perform any repairs at this time. Do not be scared to tell the customer you cannot figure the issue out. But do not just throw in the towel right out of the gate. As I am typing this, we currently have two vehicles with intermittent issues, one is a massive battery draw only after you shut the engine down once in a blue moon. And the other is a random extended crank. And like I stated before, we are checking these vehicles between working on other projects.
And always remember “Did you even diag bro?”
