Recently,
my girlfriend’s Honda was having some problems. Subtle problems, like
the check engine light intermittently coming on and occasional
hesitations. It was a thorn in her side, so needless to say it was a
thorn in mine, too. I looked around for any obvious problems and found
none of the usual suspects. The spark plugs had a lot of soot on them,
figured I might as well change them. Despite shiny new plugs, the
problem remained and this did not impress the lady friend.
Rather than considering myself a shitty mechanic, I imagine myself as House,
the tortured, pill popping, TV doctor who tries to figure out what’s
wrong with people. Engines aren’t so different from people-they take in
fuel (air and gas vs air, water, and food in humans) and produce work.
Still, there’s a lot of complicated things going on inside that we don’t
see.
The
fuel we run on needs to be balanced. For humans, this means that the
insulin and blood sugar levels need to be, as Goldilocks said, “just
right”. Gasoline engines are the same. In fact, the stoichiometric ratio
that an engine likes is 14.7 parts air to 1 part fuel. This is pretty
precise, and if it’s off be even a little, it usually becomes apparent.
On top of that, on car engines with 4-8 cylinders, it should be the
exact same between all the different cylinders.
Let’s
go back to 1947, when the Japanese economy was in reconstruction after
WWII. The U.S. was still occupying the islands, and sent over an expert
in statistics and planning named W. Edwards Deming
to help. The gist of Deming’s story in Japan is that he helped
institute a practice known as “statistical process control” which helped
Japanese manufacturers improve the precision of their output. By
improving precision, they could cut down on cost by making consistently
making fewer mistakes that needed rework. Statistical process control
had not yet gained wide acceptance in the U.S., so it was a novel move
for Japanese manufacturers. In fact, it wasn’t until the 1980’s that
Deming began to be recognized as an expert in the U.S.. Meanwhile, the
precision and quality of Japanese products skyrocketed. By the early
1970’s, Japanese car makers used this newfound ability to create engines that both used less gas and lowered emissions. When the oil crisis of 1973 struck, new fuel efficiency regulations were imposed and American car companies were caught with their pants down.
They couldn’t make small engines that balanced both fuel economy and
power. As a result, the American car consumers flocked to buy the
Japanese brands, and Detroit has been in decline since. Kaizen is
a Japanese word that describes a philosophy of continuous improvement
in business, engineering, or manufacturing. Japanese car makers have
taken it to heart and continue to lead the pack in regards to quality.
This is all well and good for my girlfriend and her Honda. Unfortunately
for me, I drive a German car.
While my dad’s assertion that “all an engine needs is air, gas, and spark” is still correct, it doesn’t tell me how much each of those it needs. Learning the stoichiometric ratio needed doesn’t really help me either, as I don’t have the tools to measure what the engine is getting anyway. We gave up and took it to a dealer, who suggested checking the valve clearances, luckily not exploratory open thoracic surgery. With adjustments as small as one or two thousandths of an inch, things were back as they came from the Honda factory within a few hours. And yup, the check engine light has stayed off. The subtle, precise balance of air to fuel across the 4 cylinders has been restored. House brilliantly saved another patient. And my girlfriend has finally stopped bitching about her car.
