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Showerthought: setting injector lash with feeler gauges vs. watching a laptop do it for me
Back in 2004 I did every injector set by hand on a 5.9 with a feeler gauge and a torque wrench, and I could knock out six of them in about an hour and a half in my dad's garage in Fresno. Now the new trucks plug into a laptop and the computer walks you through it, tells you which cylinder is off, and honestly it takes me twenty minutes flat. Part of me misses the feel of it, checking that drag on the gauge and knowing it was right before the engine even turned over. Last Tuesday a young guy at our shop asked me what a feeler gauge even was for, and I had to laugh. I still keep my old set in the top drawer, the .010 and .020 blades worn shiny from years of use. Any of you older guys still do it the old way on the older engines, or have you fully handed it over to the software?
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hugo_hayes15d ago
Man, the thing nobody talks about is what that laptop does to your brain over time. When you set lash by feel, your hands are learning the engine, and that knowledge sticks with you for every other job you touch. Hand it to a screen that just says "cylinder 3, adjust to spec" and the guy running it never builds that sense at all. Ten years from now the young kid who doesn't know what a feeler gauge is will be the same guy who can't diagnose anything without a code reader telling him where to look. The software didn't just save you twenty minutes, it quietly took the teacher out of the room. I still do my 12 valve by hand, and I'll keep doing it that way until my hands quit on me.
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