JD GUMBEE
Well-known member
- Joined
- Feb 7, 2018
- Messages
- 826
- Reaction score
- 18
Kaylee and I had made plans to build CRVL/Vandweller folk a searchable database they could enter a perspective vehicle in...as in "Dodge Van" "1996" "3500" and they would be shown, from thousands of examples of 1996 Dodge 3500 vans, what common repairs and failures occur.
We both thought this was a great idea and would help the wheel-dweller community.
The info below is an explanation of issues that have come up in making this a reality.
This issue is not a one, two or even five paragraph situation.
It is very important to understand the examples here before (and...if) things move forward.
The amount of effort required to make this reality is immense and it needs to be worth while.
If you are in the market for a vehicle or simply seek an understanding of the issues at hand, this should not be time wasted.
(Well, except for the final three sentences maybe.
)
A while back, after I posted some info on a certain van, a member posted an opinion in reply. Without the raw information I gleaned the info from, he said, the post was nothing but my own opinion, in a sea of them. This has been on my mind quite a bit over the last few months. How to do a search-friendly vehicle dBase, get a sticky linked to CRVL...what to include and not include. This sounds easy, but there is a lot to consider. I do this for a living and even I was shocked at the amount of info within that can be misleading.
Recently, we had a bunch of Ford rear ends fail. Brand new trucks were coming in after 300 miles with hot axles and horrible sounding groans. It ended up affecting 26 trucks to start with and more than 40 of them ended up being affected long term. The reason for the issue was in the assembly, not the design. A new or idiot person putting them together had actually installed the wrong bearings in a group of them.
After the first batch was discovered, we sent a bulletin out and took brand new trucks apart to ensure the bearings were proper and correctly installed. This was a bill back to Ford and rather simple to do...IF you caught it before the thing destroyed itself. Still, on every one of the VIN’s for those trucks, there is a repair order with a differential issue showing up.
Same logic applies to much older vehicles. Let’s use the 6.2 GM diesel, often talked about here on these forums. If you look on line and are not a mechanic, you would think they were a troublesome engine to avoid. The truth is, besides a certain year-span with the gremlin-loaded injection pump, they are actually very reliable, solid engines for their power range. There are actually more issues surrounding the early Duramax engines than from the early-injection pump 6.2 diesels. If you looked at the data, however, there are still thousands of injection pump issues RO’s were written on. Before they figured it out, often several on the very same vehicle.
The 7.3 Ford diesels... A ton of them burned out the harnesses right above the valve covers. Stopped many buses in their tracks and they had to be towed in. A 7.3, turbo or not, is a more reliable engine than any of the other up-to-2016 Ford offerings. However, it had that wiring issue as an Achilles heel. $200 and you could solve the issue, which normally only affected the 150,000 mile plus units...but there are loads of RO’s written on this issue...giving Ford a bad return on one of their best diesels to date.
Even the GM engines in the FWD mid sized cars (the 2.8/3.1/3.5 and the 3.8) all had little gremlins in the intakes. Plastic pipes and intakes that would leak, requiring the “fix” to be done. It was a one time thing, but cost money...and generated that RO every time. Unless you knew the whole enchilada, seeing it would present them as problematic. In truth, that series of engine was one of the most reliable 30+MPG unit out there at the time. They usually went beyond the 200,000 mark...JUST like a Honda Accord or Toyota Camry...and with a lot more gorilla power for the gallons of fuel burned.
Internationals shipped thousands of trucks that had chronic fuel injection issues. A little water got into the fuel and the whole computer board and pump assembly would have to be replaced. This cost thousands of dollars on every truck affected and kept it out of service...often for days. The engine? The electronic DT466. One of the truly best mid-range diesel engines ever made. (Many even consider them superior to the Cummins “C” engine.) However, if Kaylee and I work on this dBase...and a bus hunter were to search the info without knowing context...they would come up with “chronic fuel injection failures” as a result of their query. Truth is, the idiots ordering the truck opted out of the secondary water separator...once added, they were still gorilla-strong and Methuselah-reliable. The results from the query would not say this, however.
Another member here eluded to the 4.3 GM V6 having chronic intake gasket issues. On all my info, the vehicles with these engines got used like mad and were swapped out quickly. These issues happened over time, more than wear. The gaskets would give up and the oil would mix with the coolant. POOF! goes the engine. I had no idea this was something to watch out for based on my info. Now I do. Had she not grilled me on it, I would still tell people the 4.3 is a perfectly solid engine. Just a 350 missing two pistons...a lot better than Fords (OR Chryslers) comparable V6 engine. While this is all true, because of the specific use of the units in my data, I would have failed to warn the prospective buyer about the specific year(s) with the “questionable gaskets.” The repair does not ruin the value of the engine, but without knowing about it and knowing how to ensure it wasn’t starting to happen, the average nomad would be blissfully happy with their purchase and unaware of trouble...till it popped its engine. A search of the data would only reinforce the “thumbs up” on a 4.3 GM engine.
Without context, the raw data will do as much harm as it will good. I changed engines, transmissions, replaced rear ends, brakes...traced electrical...all before I could even legally drive...and still it took years to fully wrap my head around what I was looking at. Being able to prompt some visual SQL generator is not going to properly dissect the information. Even the experienced mechanics among CRVL members are not going to remember the idiot who falsely gave Ford 40 rear end issues... There is no place for that in the database and frankly, it would take longer, on an RO-by-RO basis, to go through and assign an explanation for than I am willing to spend.
I have nearly half a million VIN’s I now have permission to do with as I please. The stuff that is older now and not so valuable to the outfits I work for. The only thing that would not be there, would be the actual vehicle VIN. A simple script to replace the VIN with a “JD-CRVLxxxxxxx” number would take care of this. (...and a bunch of work on Kaylee’s part for the front end.) Of this number, a large percentage is van and one ton type vehicles, directly applicable to the vans and RV’s many of us travel in. Only, you wont have the ability to see what outfit the units were leased to. Was the van leased to a courier service who loaded it with 800 pounds at the most and put 40,000 miles a year...all highway...on the thing between NYC and Boston??? Or was it a van with a reefer unit that hauled signature kosher meats, loaded beyond it’s limits, throughout the boroughs? Do you see the reason why the raw data might present poor info without the background?
I am still very torn about what to do. I am paid to interpret the info for a reason. Been doing this since the 90‘s and even after all the clever dBase tools they have created, they cannot trust a green college IT graduate that has not worked in the truck shops and knows the business.
Let me give another glaring example we recently “stressed” over...
We recently had to make an order of $36 million in new trucks. The owners were headed in one direction, based on a recent bad experience with “brand A.” The data from my own efforts seemed to agree with their decision...but they asked me (actually ONE of the owners gave me the purchase order to investigate the decision further) to look into why the numbers were coming up this way. “FRAME BODY REPAIR/RUST” was the billable repair. Over and over again. Too many, they thought. (So did I.) These trucks previously lasted far past their life in the leasing fleet, giving us a very resalable unit at lease end...but there were these rust repairs needed over and over again in nearly every one of them...and dealers do NOT like a patched/welded frame.
I called the shop foreman I know well. “What do you think of this situation? They are pissed the frames are rotten and needing patches all the time...and ready to switch brands for this fleet.” (Think about this now. You have, lets say...4600 trucks leased to this customer nationwide. Now think about how a new truck brand means a complete second set of spare parts that need to be stocked. In every shop. Mechanics have to learn the tricks to fixing an entirely new beast...and all the little idiosyncrasies that come with each new model.
Cha-CHING!!! When your profit margin percentages are often in the single digits, you have to make sure each and every decision you make is the right one, or 264 men and women lose their livelihoods.)
He cleared it all up for me in 30 seconds. This company back hauled bags of rock salt in their reefers. It was clean and did not stink, so it did not cause issues with the load of food inside it the next day. A quick rinse out of the walls and floor and you could not even tell it had been in there. Of course, it caused holy ruckus with the aluminum floors and the drain holes in the reefer body dropped the salty brine run-off from the ice, (that builds up naturally) dripping on the salt bags...right on those perfectly solid, well-made frames. For 20 inches of that frame, it may as well have been 30 feet deep in the ocean. Took the paint off the rest of it and made a 7 year old Southern truck look like a 30 year old Northern truck underneath...on one side, anyway. (The RO’s did not define WHY the repairs were required other than “RUST/CORROSION.”)
I had no idea what they were hauling. Had I not made the call to the foreman, they would have likely gone to a new manufacturer. Forget the 36 million in trucks that may have or may not have been as good...the parts inventory costs and training the mechanics on the new iron would have been astronomical. It’s a tricky business. Cut throat and often, thankless. I am ready to retire for good now. Truly. Point to all of you is, there truly is a lot more than repair orders to consider.
At present, I thought about grabbing certain example vehicles/engines and listing what to look out for as more of a general thing. Only...on this very forum, an excellent write up on vans lists Ford OD transmissions as being great or excellent. The C6 was the last “excellent” automatic I saw from Ford. Every OD since then, (1996 ish) up to 2016 ish, has not compared to the GM heavier stuff. (Not even counting the Allisons behind many 8.1 gassers and the Duramax powered trucks.) “Excellent” to me, means at a 250,000 mile say-good-bye point, the truck has the exact same trans it left the factory with. Untouched. Maybe a speed sensor or a linkage/prop shaft seal repair...but the thing never had major failure and remained bolted in place. The great majority of Ford OD’s fail to deliver this kind of service. So how do I explain this differing point of view? The author of the sticky I am talking about is no dumb-ass. His obvious experience tells him something and he posts it. Most people think a service life on an automatic trans should be 150,000 miles. If they get that out of it and have to rebuild it, it was a success. This is why if you read my posts to shoppers here, I often ask the “how long do you want it for” question.
For light trucks, we only entered the era of 250K+ life spans in the last 10 years. Before that, nothing light was kept nearly that long. By the time we knew which units could do it, there had already been a huge exodus of perfectly worthy vehicles to auction @ low mileage. Even the long term data I have is somewhat rare. Many lease outfits still drop light duty units @ 150,000 no matter what.
Not sure how this is going to work out or what is going to happen. All are urged to post their input. I am wide open to suggestions/solutions. Every way I go at this, be it too little of one model/make/era or 340 units being unnaturally loaded and strictly used in city deliveries (reducing service life greatly, through no fault of the manufacturer) thus far, I have not been able to come up with effective compromise. Not sure if the generalities are less effective than a small sliver of the CRVL community who would actually enter search parameters and send a statement to the database.
(I want everyones input except High Desert Ranger. LOL His vote does not count. )
Wow, I took way too much perverse pleasure in typing that last line. I keep smiling as I review it...should I hit POST, or be a good Mongo?? After all, HDR is but a pawn too...right?
In the end, I just cannot resist the opportunity to bust his chops. (It's the little things that make life worth living.)
(Kidding about HDR though. I could use his valuable input...or viable solution.)
Time now for the tin foil hat, then curling up with my ham radio for a bit (tuned to illegal frequencies, of course.)
We both thought this was a great idea and would help the wheel-dweller community.
The info below is an explanation of issues that have come up in making this a reality.
This issue is not a one, two or even five paragraph situation.
It is very important to understand the examples here before (and...if) things move forward.
The amount of effort required to make this reality is immense and it needs to be worth while.
If you are in the market for a vehicle or simply seek an understanding of the issues at hand, this should not be time wasted.
(Well, except for the final three sentences maybe.
)A while back, after I posted some info on a certain van, a member posted an opinion in reply. Without the raw information I gleaned the info from, he said, the post was nothing but my own opinion, in a sea of them. This has been on my mind quite a bit over the last few months. How to do a search-friendly vehicle dBase, get a sticky linked to CRVL...what to include and not include. This sounds easy, but there is a lot to consider. I do this for a living and even I was shocked at the amount of info within that can be misleading.
Recently, we had a bunch of Ford rear ends fail. Brand new trucks were coming in after 300 miles with hot axles and horrible sounding groans. It ended up affecting 26 trucks to start with and more than 40 of them ended up being affected long term. The reason for the issue was in the assembly, not the design. A new or idiot person putting them together had actually installed the wrong bearings in a group of them.
After the first batch was discovered, we sent a bulletin out and took brand new trucks apart to ensure the bearings were proper and correctly installed. This was a bill back to Ford and rather simple to do...IF you caught it before the thing destroyed itself. Still, on every one of the VIN’s for those trucks, there is a repair order with a differential issue showing up.
Same logic applies to much older vehicles. Let’s use the 6.2 GM diesel, often talked about here on these forums. If you look on line and are not a mechanic, you would think they were a troublesome engine to avoid. The truth is, besides a certain year-span with the gremlin-loaded injection pump, they are actually very reliable, solid engines for their power range. There are actually more issues surrounding the early Duramax engines than from the early-injection pump 6.2 diesels. If you looked at the data, however, there are still thousands of injection pump issues RO’s were written on. Before they figured it out, often several on the very same vehicle.
The 7.3 Ford diesels... A ton of them burned out the harnesses right above the valve covers. Stopped many buses in their tracks and they had to be towed in. A 7.3, turbo or not, is a more reliable engine than any of the other up-to-2016 Ford offerings. However, it had that wiring issue as an Achilles heel. $200 and you could solve the issue, which normally only affected the 150,000 mile plus units...but there are loads of RO’s written on this issue...giving Ford a bad return on one of their best diesels to date.
Even the GM engines in the FWD mid sized cars (the 2.8/3.1/3.5 and the 3.8) all had little gremlins in the intakes. Plastic pipes and intakes that would leak, requiring the “fix” to be done. It was a one time thing, but cost money...and generated that RO every time. Unless you knew the whole enchilada, seeing it would present them as problematic. In truth, that series of engine was one of the most reliable 30+MPG unit out there at the time. They usually went beyond the 200,000 mark...JUST like a Honda Accord or Toyota Camry...and with a lot more gorilla power for the gallons of fuel burned.
Internationals shipped thousands of trucks that had chronic fuel injection issues. A little water got into the fuel and the whole computer board and pump assembly would have to be replaced. This cost thousands of dollars on every truck affected and kept it out of service...often for days. The engine? The electronic DT466. One of the truly best mid-range diesel engines ever made. (Many even consider them superior to the Cummins “C” engine.) However, if Kaylee and I work on this dBase...and a bus hunter were to search the info without knowing context...they would come up with “chronic fuel injection failures” as a result of their query. Truth is, the idiots ordering the truck opted out of the secondary water separator...once added, they were still gorilla-strong and Methuselah-reliable. The results from the query would not say this, however.
Another member here eluded to the 4.3 GM V6 having chronic intake gasket issues. On all my info, the vehicles with these engines got used like mad and were swapped out quickly. These issues happened over time, more than wear. The gaskets would give up and the oil would mix with the coolant. POOF! goes the engine. I had no idea this was something to watch out for based on my info. Now I do. Had she not grilled me on it, I would still tell people the 4.3 is a perfectly solid engine. Just a 350 missing two pistons...a lot better than Fords (OR Chryslers) comparable V6 engine. While this is all true, because of the specific use of the units in my data, I would have failed to warn the prospective buyer about the specific year(s) with the “questionable gaskets.” The repair does not ruin the value of the engine, but without knowing about it and knowing how to ensure it wasn’t starting to happen, the average nomad would be blissfully happy with their purchase and unaware of trouble...till it popped its engine. A search of the data would only reinforce the “thumbs up” on a 4.3 GM engine.
Without context, the raw data will do as much harm as it will good. I changed engines, transmissions, replaced rear ends, brakes...traced electrical...all before I could even legally drive...and still it took years to fully wrap my head around what I was looking at. Being able to prompt some visual SQL generator is not going to properly dissect the information. Even the experienced mechanics among CRVL members are not going to remember the idiot who falsely gave Ford 40 rear end issues... There is no place for that in the database and frankly, it would take longer, on an RO-by-RO basis, to go through and assign an explanation for than I am willing to spend.
I have nearly half a million VIN’s I now have permission to do with as I please. The stuff that is older now and not so valuable to the outfits I work for. The only thing that would not be there, would be the actual vehicle VIN. A simple script to replace the VIN with a “JD-CRVLxxxxxxx” number would take care of this. (...and a bunch of work on Kaylee’s part for the front end.) Of this number, a large percentage is van and one ton type vehicles, directly applicable to the vans and RV’s many of us travel in. Only, you wont have the ability to see what outfit the units were leased to. Was the van leased to a courier service who loaded it with 800 pounds at the most and put 40,000 miles a year...all highway...on the thing between NYC and Boston??? Or was it a van with a reefer unit that hauled signature kosher meats, loaded beyond it’s limits, throughout the boroughs? Do you see the reason why the raw data might present poor info without the background?
I am still very torn about what to do. I am paid to interpret the info for a reason. Been doing this since the 90‘s and even after all the clever dBase tools they have created, they cannot trust a green college IT graduate that has not worked in the truck shops and knows the business.
Let me give another glaring example we recently “stressed” over...
We recently had to make an order of $36 million in new trucks. The owners were headed in one direction, based on a recent bad experience with “brand A.” The data from my own efforts seemed to agree with their decision...but they asked me (actually ONE of the owners gave me the purchase order to investigate the decision further) to look into why the numbers were coming up this way. “FRAME BODY REPAIR/RUST” was the billable repair. Over and over again. Too many, they thought. (So did I.) These trucks previously lasted far past their life in the leasing fleet, giving us a very resalable unit at lease end...but there were these rust repairs needed over and over again in nearly every one of them...and dealers do NOT like a patched/welded frame.
I called the shop foreman I know well. “What do you think of this situation? They are pissed the frames are rotten and needing patches all the time...and ready to switch brands for this fleet.” (Think about this now. You have, lets say...4600 trucks leased to this customer nationwide. Now think about how a new truck brand means a complete second set of spare parts that need to be stocked. In every shop. Mechanics have to learn the tricks to fixing an entirely new beast...and all the little idiosyncrasies that come with each new model.
Cha-CHING!!! When your profit margin percentages are often in the single digits, you have to make sure each and every decision you make is the right one, or 264 men and women lose their livelihoods.)
He cleared it all up for me in 30 seconds. This company back hauled bags of rock salt in their reefers. It was clean and did not stink, so it did not cause issues with the load of food inside it the next day. A quick rinse out of the walls and floor and you could not even tell it had been in there. Of course, it caused holy ruckus with the aluminum floors and the drain holes in the reefer body dropped the salty brine run-off from the ice, (that builds up naturally) dripping on the salt bags...right on those perfectly solid, well-made frames. For 20 inches of that frame, it may as well have been 30 feet deep in the ocean. Took the paint off the rest of it and made a 7 year old Southern truck look like a 30 year old Northern truck underneath...on one side, anyway. (The RO’s did not define WHY the repairs were required other than “RUST/CORROSION.”)
I had no idea what they were hauling. Had I not made the call to the foreman, they would have likely gone to a new manufacturer. Forget the 36 million in trucks that may have or may not have been as good...the parts inventory costs and training the mechanics on the new iron would have been astronomical. It’s a tricky business. Cut throat and often, thankless. I am ready to retire for good now. Truly. Point to all of you is, there truly is a lot more than repair orders to consider.
At present, I thought about grabbing certain example vehicles/engines and listing what to look out for as more of a general thing. Only...on this very forum, an excellent write up on vans lists Ford OD transmissions as being great or excellent. The C6 was the last “excellent” automatic I saw from Ford. Every OD since then, (1996 ish) up to 2016 ish, has not compared to the GM heavier stuff. (Not even counting the Allisons behind many 8.1 gassers and the Duramax powered trucks.) “Excellent” to me, means at a 250,000 mile say-good-bye point, the truck has the exact same trans it left the factory with. Untouched. Maybe a speed sensor or a linkage/prop shaft seal repair...but the thing never had major failure and remained bolted in place. The great majority of Ford OD’s fail to deliver this kind of service. So how do I explain this differing point of view? The author of the sticky I am talking about is no dumb-ass. His obvious experience tells him something and he posts it. Most people think a service life on an automatic trans should be 150,000 miles. If they get that out of it and have to rebuild it, it was a success. This is why if you read my posts to shoppers here, I often ask the “how long do you want it for” question.
For light trucks, we only entered the era of 250K+ life spans in the last 10 years. Before that, nothing light was kept nearly that long. By the time we knew which units could do it, there had already been a huge exodus of perfectly worthy vehicles to auction @ low mileage. Even the long term data I have is somewhat rare. Many lease outfits still drop light duty units @ 150,000 no matter what.
Not sure how this is going to work out or what is going to happen. All are urged to post their input. I am wide open to suggestions/solutions. Every way I go at this, be it too little of one model/make/era or 340 units being unnaturally loaded and strictly used in city deliveries (reducing service life greatly, through no fault of the manufacturer) thus far, I have not been able to come up with effective compromise. Not sure if the generalities are less effective than a small sliver of the CRVL community who would actually enter search parameters and send a statement to the database.
(I want everyones input except High Desert Ranger. LOL
His vote does not count. )Wow, I took way too much perverse pleasure in typing that last line. I keep smiling as I review it...should I hit POST, or be a good Mongo?? After all, HDR is but a pawn too...right?
In the end, I just cannot resist the opportunity to bust his chops.
(It's the little things that make life worth living.)(Kidding about HDR though. I could use his valuable input...or viable solution.)
Time now for the tin foil hat, then curling up with my ham radio for a bit (tuned to illegal frequencies, of course.)
