"Larry Jaques" wrote in message
...
On Mon, 22 Sep 2014 12:59:49 -0400, "Jim Wilkins"
wrote:


Lots of these folks are either getting out of the business or dying
from old age, so what comes next, when all of the true knowledge is
gone? How far away are we from the coming global Idiocracy?

While I was analyzing the electrical problem in my 1991 truck someone
told me about a shop that specializes in automotive engine
electronics, so I stopped in to talk to them. The owner told me that I
had become the local expert on the EEC-IV system by default, since
every mechanic who had worked on it was gone. The Ford dealers told me
nearly the same thing.

All I really knew was how the sensors work, from chemistry and having
worked on GM's test stations for them in the 70's, the basics of spark
ignition and how to use a scope. The Mass Air Flow sensor is a
simplified version of the bridge detector in a chemist's Gas
Chromatograph.

I saw the same hot-wire principle used on a Bosch injector pump tester
we built to measure the uniformity of the nozzle spray pattern. I
didn't actually work on that machine and can't give Iggy useful
details such as the full capacity of the row of graduated glass tubes
that measured each cylinder's flow volume. A 10 HP variable speed DC
motor drove the pump being tested.

In Germany I followed the dystopian Sudden Death comic series,
European equivalents to R. Crumb. One of their visions was that the
"sacred electronics" would become the arcane knowledge of old guys.

-jsw