Drawing from his enormous experience as a real-world diagnostician of the hardest problems, John Anello presents a way of approaching solutions that combines deep understanding of the systems involved with high energy.

Each of the trainers we’ve covered or will in this series brings a unique background to the things he teaches and the way he teaches them, and none is more unique than John Anello. Long-time readers of this magazine will recall from our February 1998 issue that his ‘day job’ consists of taking on nine or ten very difficult automotive diagnostic problems, problem cars shops in his area have either given up on or don’t have the equipment to solve. His deal is simple: a fixed amount for a certain kind of job, such as a driveability or electrical/electronic problem — if he solves it, you pay; if he doesn’t, you don’t. And John Anello doesn’t miss very often. All this prac-tice under time-pressure makes for diagnostic skills that must be both quick and accurate —nobody’s going to fool the professional shops that are paying for work.

This wealth of diagnostic experience provides him with fodder for his training sessions, all drawn from real-world problem cars he has actually seen and fixed. In many cases, he’s also taken digital photos of the component that failed or was damaged for his later, constantly updated training sessions.

Many trainers use a quiet, laid-back style, reassuring to many people. Not John Anello. Deriving from both the high-pressure of his regular business or just from his energetic personal disposition, Anello sets a pace that can leave a more placid per-son far behind. Drift off during his seminar, and you miss something, probably something he won’t repeat! The concentration you bring to his training can make a significant difference in how much you carry away from it later, a quality of energy that is very good to bring to the work as long as you can sustain Anello’s focus at the same time.

Anello wrote and continues to add to the now 180-page book he uses in combination with his course. Each section covers one type of component or subsystem typically found on today’s computer-controlled engine systems. The seminar he’s based on the book lasts about eight hours, though typical-ly people come early, talk through lunch and stay late to talk longer. His original plan was to use these seminars chiefly for those shops that work with him most often, since he’d reached a time-saturation when it came to solving problems they ran into. By providing them with as many of his diagnostic insights as he could in an organized manner, he hoped to equip them with the next level of service after his hands-on, real-world work on cars in their shops. As word of his training spread, more of the people who came to class were from outside the area he serves, but their need to develop such high-speed diagnostic skills is the same.

To illustrate his points, Anello not only uses a projection computer to display the problems he’s run into and solved (and some he hasn’t!), but he also carries with him a complete engine management system on a board, with each component in working condition. This allows piecemeal disabling of various components to see what the consequences are for the rest of the system, how it goes into limp-home or falls out of closed loop.

For some high-energy, high-speed and high-con-tent training, you might consider signing up for one of John Anello’s seminars. Circle Number 121 on our Reader Response Card, and we’ll pass the word along to him.