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Rant: I paid $310 for a smoke machine to find one vacuum leak and it was worth every penny
Bought a cheap smoke machine off the tool truck about 3 months ago for $310, mostly as a joke because the older guys at my shop in Dayton call them toys. Then a 2011 Silverado came in with a P0171 lean code that had already been through two other shops, and the owner was out $600 with nothing fixed. I smoked the intake and within 4 minutes I could see a steady stream coming off the intake gasket near cylinder 6, hiding behind the fuel rail where nobody had looked. Intake gasket set was $22 and the job paid 2.8 hours, so the guy left happy and we looked like heroes for once. Before that machine I would have sprayed carb cleaner around for half an hour and probably still missed it. The hose clamp on the machine already broke once and I had to zip tie it back together, so the build quality is junk, but it flat out finds leaks. Anybody else using a smoke machine as a first step instead of a last resort? Curious what you charge for a diagnostic smoke test.
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schmidt.eva11d ago
That bit about spraying carb cleaner for half an hour and still missing it is the part that got me. A buddy of mine runs a small shop out past Springfield and he had a Camry with a lean code that two dealers gave up on. He borrowed a smoke machine from another guy in town, smoked it, and found a cracked intake tube down low where you could not see it or reach it with a spray can. Took him ten minutes after two days of guessing. He bought his own machine the next week and says the same thing you do, the thing is built cheap but it pays for itself on the first hard job. He charges an hour for the smoke test and nobody has pushed back on it yet, mostly because the cars show up after other shops already burned the customer's money.
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