That talk with an old timer at the supply house got me thinking

I was picking up some wire rope at the local supply house last Tuesday and this retired mechanic, must have been 70 years old, started chatting me up. He said something like "you kids rely too much on the computer diagnostics, you don't feel the machine anymore." At first I kind of brushed it off, but then I got back to a job where I was chasing a ghost fault on a 20 year old Otis. Spent 3 hours plugging in my test gear and getting nowhere. Finally I just listened to the car going up and down, heard this weird scraping on the return sheave, and sure enough a guide shoe was dragging. Made me realize I had been totally skipping the basic stuff because I was so focused on fancy tools. Has anyone else had that moment where you missed something obvious because you were looking for the complicated answer?

3 comments

3 Comments

val_williams9d ago

Nah, it's like that old saying about how a carpenter who only uses a hammer sees every problem as a nail.

grantw328d ago

Yeah that reminds me of something my buddy @val_williams once said about fixing a leaky faucet with a wrench he didn't need.

derek_perez8d ago

You ever notice how the universe loves to make you look stupid right after you doubted someone? An old timer says something wise, you shrug it off, and then bam you spend three hours proving him right the hard way. That guide shoe probably would've been a ten minute fix if you'd just started with your ears instead of the oscilloscope. We're all walking around with these thousand dollar diagnostic kits and forgot how to listen to a machine breathe. Maybe the real test equipment is the friends we made along the way, or whatever the meme says.