Tuesday, November 18, 2008

Winter air...........



So..... the tire pressure indicator pops on in my truck. Each wheel has a transmitter and a sensor, giving data to the on board system which notifies me of tire pressure issues. The ones on my truck seem to be sensitive to a 3-4 PSI difference in tire pressure, as well as cold temperatures. As we are facing freezing temperatures each morning now, which lowers pressure quite a bit, the light was no surprise.

This morning, before the students arrived, I pulled all four valve stem cores from my tires and let them fully deflate. This lets the sensors reposition for a while, which I feel is good considering they rarely ever see anything but full tire pressure.

As my students arrived for the day, of course they had questions. "Mr. Carteach0, what happened to your truck?!?" Naturally I could not give a straight answer without playing with them a bit...

"Well boys, it's Winter now. I need to get that old Summer air out and install some fresh Winter air, or it will ride pretty bad in the cold weather".

Blink.

Blink.

Of course, one of them pipes up.. "Oh, I thought maybe you were resetting the tire pressure sensors".



6 comments:

Old NFO said...

bad.... :-) But funny as hell! At least one of them got it right...LOL

"He's just this guy, you know?" said...

Oh, they all got it eventually, or most did. The ones who cared enough to ask what was going on.

I like to have some fun with my little angels (euphemism for words I shall not type). It makes the day enjoyable, and they learn more.
I can go from laugh to serious in a flash, and so can they. They are far more open to learning new things when they start with a laugh.

Next year, the school will give me a fresh batch of young minds to warp and play with. Ain't life grand?

Old NFO said...

At least you get em early... I get to deal with em AFTER they have their PHDs! Never seen so damn many people that couldn't pour piss out of a boot with instructions on the heel, but are absolutely brilliant in their fields... sigh...

"He's just this guy, you know?" said...

NFO, I start them at the beginning of the year with the concept of a 'crap meter' in their heads.

Anything just too off the wall to be possible should trip their crap meter. A car battery voltage reading of 18 volts should do so, a metric coversion that has 11.20" turn into 34 millimeters should as well.

It's a fun way of saying common sense.... and yes, I try to teach that. It's the most valuable thing I could ever get through to them, on the rare occasions I am able to.

Sorry to say.... I too often lack that sense myself.

Scott said...

You should really lube the muffler bearings also. Are your students aware of iATN.net. It's an exellent resource for the professional technician.

"He's just this guy, you know?" said...

Scott, I've been a member of iATN since it cracked 1000 people signed up. That was a LONG time ago.

I don't tell my students about it because of the 'experience' requirement. Brent really has no way to enforce that except to deal with problem cases, and I'd hate to dump a large number of newbies into the iATN system for him to deal with. I've talked with him about 'read only' student memberships, but it's just not that easy to do.

On the other hand, I seldom fail to tell my adult evening classes about iATN.