One of the many changes we have implemented since January was to stop outsourcing our diagnostics work, We have spent a lot of time at our sister garage investing on diagnostics and training and it is an area I would like to develop at Bridgecut Motors too. Whilst we are in the process of training and investment it is nice to have the support of our sister company Hollier and Sons to help us and support our customers.

Something we have already learnt at Hollier and Sons was there is not one tool in a mechanics tool box that can undo all the nuts and bolts on a car, likewise there isn't one piece of equipment that can diagnose all the faults we see on both modern petrol and diesel engine vehicles. That is why over the last four years we have invested heavily in new equipment and training in order to improve our capability to problem solve. We use a multitude of different types of equipment together with our experience and knowledge gained over our many years of working with motor vehicles, with the objective of being able to problem solve almost any fault you will ever experience.

We extensively use two scan tools, Bosch kts unit which is supplied with a vast database of vehicle systems and test procedures, together with a Delphi DS unit both covering 95% of what we come into contact with, for the remaining 5%, we use an Omiscan unit which is very good at getting in to those more obscure setups.

More recently we have been closing the loop and are now using a pico oscilloscope to then confirm our findings or carry out further investigations into more complicated systems and their components.

The story behind our quest (keeping ahead of the rest)

After years of using an early scan tool and outsourcing most of our diagnostics work we felt we needed to gain control of diagnostics activities within the core business of Hollier and Sons. We purchased a Delphi ds scan tool but within a year found that we had soon met the full capacity of the equipment and we were still being faced with ever increasingly challenging electrical problems that could not be investigated by this level of equipment. It took a further year and a half, and more equipment to get to a point where we realised the problem we were faced with was a scan tool can only tell you what your cars electronic control unit thinks is wrong with your car so anything on the other side of the ecu is therefore trial and error (which can lead to being a very expensive way of correcting any faults on a car). Early in 2008 we started to investigate the use of oscilloscopes and the application of how to inspect both sensors and actuators which could only ever be looked at via an ecu, in February 2008 we invested in our first scope and have undergone training which has opened up a whole new area of diagnostics capability for ourselves not only giving us the confidence in our full diagnostics of the problem but also making us more efficient in the estimate to repair and rectification of the vehicle.