Comment by cratermoon
5 years ago
When I was a boy, my dad decided that our '66 Mustang with a straight 4-cylinder engine needed new piston rings. I helped a bit but mostly watched as he tore down the engine to the barest elements, only the engine mounts keeping the block held up in the compartment. The crankshaft, connecting rods, tappers valves, piston heads, piston rods, all laid out neatly on the garage floor along with all the nuts, bolts, washers, seals, gaskets, belts, and everything else you see in this video.
Although I really appreciate the reliability, efficiency, and durability that modern engine design has brought, a part of me is sad that modern cars are all about chips and software, and the average guy in his garage or under a shadetree can no longer break one down to the bare bones of electromechanical parts and put it back together better than it was.
> Although I really appreciate the reliability, efficiency, and durability that modern engine design has brought, a part of me is sad that modern cars are all about chips and software, and the average guy in his garage or under a shadetree can no longer break one down to the bare bones of electromechanical parts and put it back together better than it was.
That's a totally flawed understanding of modern ICE vehicles.
There was an era of vacuum-line misery separating the 70s and 90s, where you'd almost certainly never get it back together and functioning good as new again with the literal miles of vacuum lines and solenoids.
But modern stuff, especially with just 4 cylinders, is relatively simple and entirely DIY servicable. Wiring harnesses have replaced all the vacuum lines, and everything has a physically unique connector pair, and the harness routing is well described in the service manual. So all the guesswork is gone there, honestly the worst part on new stuff is not overlooking any of the grounding lugs.
I share your attitude WRT modern EVs, but I bet if we just treat the controller and battery as black boxes we don't attempt to disassemble and service, the rest is just more of the same simple machinery except with no hazardous gasoline and motor oil to drain and handle.
> "Wiring harnesses have replaced all the vacuum lines"
Of course, now days the wiring harnesses themselves have become huge and unwieldy in many vehicles - literal miles of cables! Automakers are looking at technologies like automotive ethernet and even wireless communication in order to reduce the cost, size and complexity of wiring.
> "I share your attitude WRT modern EVs, but I bet if we just treat the controller and battery as black boxes we don't attempt to disassemble and service"
Some EV batteries are quite serviceable (eg: LEAF), with the pack being able to be disassembled right down to the cell level relatively easily. Although admittedly, some modern pack designs are moving away from this level of serviceability (eg: Tesla, whose cells are cemented in place with fire-retardant foam/glue. Disassembly is a one-way operation).
Things like motor controllers/inverters tend to be very reliable so there is rarely any need to disassemble or service them during the lifetime of the vehicle. If they do fail there's a ready supply of affordable replacement parts, thanks to salvage from crashed vehicles, so it's often easier to just replace a faulty part than attempt to service.
> Of course, now days the wiring harnesses themselves have become huge and unwieldy in many vehicles - literal miles of cables!
Engine harnesses are not that bad in my experience, especially not for a small 4-cyl. Chassis harnesses, with all the bells and whistles they keep piling into smartphones on wheels, agreed. But we're talking about engines here.
> Things like motor controllers/inverters tend to be very reliable so there is rarely any need to disassemble or service them during the lifetime of the vehicle. If they do fail there's a ready supply of affordable replacement parts, thanks to salvage from crashed vehicles, so it's often easier to just replace a faulty part than attempt to service.
I figured as much. This is basically already the case with all the various modules littering the chassis in modern ICE vehicles. We don't service the power steering or engine control modules; it either works or you replace it, usually with some cheap used replacement from a wrecker. Unless the car's been flooded, the miles and age don't seem to be a problem except the occasional cold solder joint.
Many more of my hours have been wasted fussing with jets and floats on old carburetors than any control modules on these newfangled computerized vehicles.
An aspect that appeals to me is interchangeability. If you needed to replace an engine or other major components, even just to similar items in the manufacturers lineup, there's definitely a "golden era" of late 80s to early 2000s cars where that is feasible for the...more enthusiast home mechanic. While not impossible for modern cars, it is far far more difficult.
I think the design of a wiring harness is actually a good analogy for a well-created API, in that it provides a handful of endpoints, each of which fulfills a "contract". On modern wiring harnesses, it's pretty hard to connect the wrong thing, because the connectors are physically "typed", in that the male and female sides are uniquely shaped so only they will mate up, rather than having a generic connector that plugs in to every sensor.
On the contrary, twisting a distributor to set timing, or doing _anything_ on a carburator, will make you long for those aspects of ICE to be abstracted to control by software. Weirdly enough, that's what's happened over time in cars with direct injection controlled by ECUs.
Obviously it's nostalgia for me, but timing lights, distributors, points, carburetor ports and butterfly valves, you could really see into the mechanisms. Hell, my dad (who was a master mechanic and worked on cars and railroad diesel engines to put himself through college) took a drill to the fuel injectors on a shitty 80s Chrysler engine that was knocking and stalling when cold (no amount of adjusting the choke could fix it). I drove that POS in my college years and never had a problem with it.
If you're doing minimally invasive wrenching on stuff that is in good condition electronics are fine until you have to do serious work to them.
Grafting two engine harnesses together because you can't buy the one you need (because nobody sells that stuff for 20+yo vehicles) will make you want a carburetor.
Plus it doesn't help when vechicle manufacturers will not share repair information with the customer, or independant repair shops.
It doesn't help when they refuse to sell scanners to independant shops, or customers.
Yes---vechicles are much more complicated, but every vechicle sold in America should be required to tell customers up front about the ease, and accessibility of required repair information.
My point is if they didn't hide repair information we might not look at modern vechicles as Challenger space ships.
I have been casually looking to buy a new vechicle, and every salesperson laughed when I asked about buying a factory manual.
Sales guy, "Oh--no one works on their car anymore, they bring it here." Sign behind him said, Shop rate is $275 hr. People drinking Starbuck's coffee for free though.
My father told a salesman to throw in a factory service manual on the sale of a '97 Dodge Dakota. Salesman, "Hell yes!". He gave him the manual before he received the truck.
And yes--after dealing with a failed smog check this week, and seeing the PID only shows up on the dealership scanner, I am more than pissed over propiatiary information. Failed smog--$125 gone. A trip to the dealership $450, for a sensor that one of the better scanners didn't have access to.
I went to Automotive School, and worked on all my vechicles ever since.
I am so hesitant on buying a new car.
Today is definitely my Right to Repair Day.
I thought about RTR movement while shopping. I was trying to think about being out, people getting vaccinated, friday, but that Right to Repair was stuck in my mind. We need to all get behind the movement.
(To tired to edit.)
Well spoken, Right to Repair, Right to be Healthy, we keep on dreaming