Over 1700 records in 6 years

Bill VanOrden (aka Beevo) Hub's Auto Clinic in Mesa, Arizona USA www.beevo.com

“I have a single AES Wave database of over 1700 records.

Its taken 6 years to grow that large!”

My tools

Main use is to database all screen captures and data output from the various tools I use.

These include:

· Interro PDA2100A · Fluke 96b Series II Scopemeter · Hickok NGS Scanner · Vetronix MasterTech Scanner/Scope

· Fluke 89 Series IV meter · OTC Monitor 4000 Enhanced · Hickok (MAC) Scanalizer Fuel Inj tester · Mavica Digital Camera

All output is cataloged and saved in a single searchable database, which has grown to around 1700 records in the last 6 years.

My vehicles

The majority of the vehicles I work on are fleet police cars, which I get to see on a regular basis: from cradle to grave. It is very important for me to be able to track when the vehicle was last in and what services were performed.

There have been many occasions where a vehicle has been returned to the PD to be sent to the dealer for warranty repairs and has reappeared in our shop several weeks or months later with the same complaint. Often, the repair was not performed at the dealer due to scheduling or oversight issues.

The AES Wave makes searching and

tracking this data easy!

The Wave

My “Wave”ing starts when a new model comes into the fleet. I baseline the vehicle by scoping all the sensors and catalog "known good". This has been a great time saver!

During the course of repairs I not only document waveforms and other data from test instruments, I also use my digital camera to document repairs that are hard to remember, or those that I do not do very often. For example, when I have to take out an instrument cluster. I save a picture and documentation to the Wave of the backs of instrument cluster after marking the major connections for the various gauges. We troubleshoot and repair these almost monthly.

When I save data to the AES Wave, I do so in a very organized manor. One of the advantages of doing so is when someone else needs to perform a repair that they are unfamiliar with. I can recall pictures, waveforms, and other data, including the instructions, print them out so other techs can efficiently and effectively perform the repair. Why reinvent the wheel? This saves them a lot of time and also frees my time up so I don’t have to walk them through particularly difficult repair.

• Images of connector plugs are saved during diagnosis so that future repairs do not require repeating the legwork of connector and pin identification.

• Police cars are a combination of factory police accessories and radio shop add-ons that have no documentation and sometimes no consistency, even though the same people are putting them in place. The database that documents these additions is an extreme time saver!

• Disassembly of complex repairs can be documented and saved for reference on reassembly when the parts finally arrive many days or weeks later.

End

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