Midnight Oil: Interactive Emissions Training
The Smoghouse software is divided into three basic sections. Each of the three menu options on the main screen is hidden behind a garage door on the Smoghouse shop.
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Author: Import Service
Hot-Wiring Today’s Car
Cars scuttle along the undulating surface of our planet at the bottom of an ocean of air twenty miles deep. They troll that ocean for its perpetually recirculating oxygen to burn their fuel and continue their scuttling travel. Sometimes their engines need a lot of air, when accelerating or climbing a hill. Sometimes they need […]
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Honda Code Breaker Part Three: Fuel Injected Hondas
If you’ve been working on and around a single vehicle line as long as I have (Hondas in my case), you’re bound to pick up the subtle nuances that distinguish one vehicle and its systems from the next. Some people call this ‘product knowledge’ and the only way to get it is by piling up […]
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Turning and Burning
Last month’s “Scoping Out The Problem” described a misidentification of an ignition system that temporarily prevented an accurate diagnosis. The technician Jorge Menchu was trying to help thought he was working on an ignition system that employed magnetic sensors to provide the ignition control unit with crankshaft and camshaft position information. This turned out to […]
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Tech Service Round-Up
In five years, you’ll look back at the ’99 models and think, “They were pretty simple.” But you won’t think so now. Technology is coming with a rush, and although items related to OBD II still are emerging, a lot more is coming on stream. In addition, a lot of the so-called “routine” underhood service […]
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Test Bench: OBD2Scan Software
Who’s the biggest computer manufacturer in the world? IBM? Nope. Compaq? Sorry, guess again. Dell? Wrong. Believe it or not, the world’s largest computer manufacturer is General Motors.
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Scoping Out The Pattern
A sawtooth signal dying into a digital signal? That sounded strange. “Are you sure? What signal is it?” I asked. “Well, it has to be the rpm signal. I’ve scoped every wire at the distributor and this is the only one with a pattern like a magnetic pickup.” After a few more questions, I suspected […]
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Honda Code Breaker Part Two: Fuel Injected Hondas
In our last installment (February 1999 Import Service), we covered ECU locations and explained how to recover diagnostic trouble codes (DTC’s) from Honda engine management systems. This month we’ll discuss exactly what the codes mean, explain why and how a code can set and identify the high-percentage repair that will usually fix the car. Keep […]
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Bank Loan Applications
One of the pleasures of running a small business is taking the time to get to know people. One of the more interesting people I’ve had the good fortune to know for many years is my friend Steve the llama farmer. When it’s not the growing season (which is very short in the Puget Sound), […]
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AC Ripple
I’d like to talk about AC ripple and dispel some misconceptions about what is it and what causes it. To do this, I will have to teeter along some of the borderlines of electronic theory, and things may seem a bit abstract at first. Please understand my purpose is not to prepare electrical engineers for […]
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