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Welcome to Stuff I Learned Yesterday. My name is Darrell Darnell, I very rarely drink soda, and I believe if you aren’t learning, you aren’t living. In today’s episode of Stuff I Learned Yesterday I share a lesson I learned from working on my car with my son.
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What I Learned Yesterday:
Are you ready for a lesson on auto repair troubleshooting? Good. There are 3 things required to make an engine operate: air, fuel, and spark. These three things not only have to be present, but they have to be combined in just the right way at just the right time. If you have just 2 of them, you get to call a cab, hop on a bike, or take off walking.
Last Saturday the kids and I hopped into my car to go grab some PVC pipe from the hardware store, but my car wouldn’t start. It had given me some trouble the week before, but after a couple of attempts at starting it, it fired up. However, on Saturday, it was a different story.
While I knew the car was not out of fuel, my first thought was that fuel was not getting into the combustion chamber. The likely candidates would be the fuel filter, or the fuel pump. Since the fuel pump is located inside the gas tank on my car, replacing it would require removing the gas tank and mess of other things that are beyond my ability to do myself. So I decided to start with replacing the fuel filter. However, before I headed off to the auto parts store, I decided to give it one more chance to start. It didn’t start up, but I noticed something new.
Now as I tried to start it, I could smell fuel. This meant that I was wrong. Fuel was making it to the combustion chamber, so one of the other two ingredients must have been missing. It seemed very unlikely that it was an issue of getting air into the motor or that the motor was losing compression. It was more likely an issue of not getting spark.
Now it was about this time that my son had decided that he wanted to watch me work on the car. As is the case with most 9 year olds, he’s very inquisitive. He wanted to know what was wrong and how I was able to figure it out. I told him all the stuff I just told you. Since he was just in time to help me troubleshoot the electrical system, I let him help me out.
I told him about the battery and how it gives power to the various components, I told him how the alternator helps to keep the battery charged. However, for our troubleshooting process, I was sure that the battery and alternator were not the problem. If they were, the car would not even be trying to start. Because the car was at least trying to start, I knew that it had electricity, it just wasn’t getting that electricity to the fuel and air at the right time.
I showed him the distributor and we followed each of the wires from the distributor to each spark plug. I also showed him another wire that led from the distributor to the ignition coil. I explained that the coil gets a charge from the battery and then sends that charge to the distributor. I told him that the distributor spins around and strikes metal connectors as it spins and sends an electrical charge to each spark plug as it spins.
I told him that if the electrical charges from the distributor were sent to the motor out of sequence or if the charge arrived at the wrong time, then the engine won’t start. He seemed to understand the basic principles, especially since we could look at each component and inspect them.
After we inspected the plug wires and the distributor, they checked out just fine. This left me with three options. The first option was that the timing of the car was off and need an adjustment. The second option was that a spark plug had gone bad. The third was that the ignition coil had gone bad. I decided that the ignition coil was not only the most likely candidate, it was also the easiest to fix.
However, I wanted to make sure I hadn’t overlooked something. Before we headed out to the auto parts store, I jumped on YouTube to see if there was anything I was missing. I also read a few short articles on what to look for when your car won’t start. What I found really helped. The information reinforced my suspicions, but also gave me a much better understanding of the way the various systems work. I’ve tried to keep it simple since I know most of you aren’t car people, but I wouldn’t have been able to explain it today if I hadn’t taken time to watch the videos and read the articles.
Colby and I headed off to the auto parts store and purchased a new ignition coil. It only took a few minutes to swap out the old one, and Colby was able to help with the process. After we got everything put back together it was time for the moment of truth. I got into my car, slid the key into the ignition and turned it. The car roared to life and Colby and I felt the sweet satisfaction of earning our man cards!
Here’s what I learned.
It was a lot of fun teaching Colby about some of the fundamentals of how a car works. I learned a lot of that stuff from my dad, and it’s pretty cool to now be teaching it to my son. However, I also learned stuff on the internet. The articles I read and the videos I watched were really helpful.
What I learned is that we all have something to learn, and we all have something to share. Knowledge is power and we all have a responsibility to share it. What do you know? Share it? Don’t put yourself down. Don’t discount your ability. You know something that someone around you doesn’t, and you should share it. How? Write a blog, create a YouTube video, or start a podcast. You could find an online forum where people are looking for assistance, and lend a hand. You can spend time with family and friends, join a mentoring program like Big Brothers Big Sisters, or the Scouts. You could even call in to a future episode of the Friday Forum.
However, just remember that we also have a responsibility to never, ever, stop learning. Learn, share, repeat. Those are three ingredients for making the world a better place.
I’m Darrell Darnell and this has been stuff I learned yesterday.
If you’ve enjoyed this episode of Stuff I Learned Yesterday, I would be grateful if you’d leave a review in iTunes.
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