Liz, our daughter-in-law and Samuel, our youngest grandchild. We visited them in November and had a picnic on the land they just closed on in late December. 

 

When I was doing electronic design work in a previous life, I liked to follow my designs into production by supporting the factory technicians. Some engineers preferred to send their designs to production and then disappear. For me, following the designs (and living with my mistakes) was a good way to gauge the quality of my designs so I could correct weaknesses on the next interaction. In the factory, I often spent my time coaching the techs on basic troubleshooting skills. Those skills are not often automatically acquired.

 

Fortunately for me, my Daddy spent a lot of time with me teaching me how to work on trucks, tractors, cars, appliances and basically anything else. I learned fractions when I was about 6 or 8 years old because when my Daddy wanted a 9/16 inch wrench, I learned it was slightly bigger than a ½ inch wrench. When I was “introduced” to fractions in school, it was a piece of cake for me.

 

Troubleshooting was another skill I learned as a boy. I actually had no idea I was “troubleshooting” and thought I was just fixing something. Basically troubleshooting involves being alert to problems and determining the cause and then fixing it. When a vehicle makes an unusual sound, that is a clue for a troubleshooter. Why would it be making that sound? Is the sound related to the engine speed or perhaps the ground speed? If you put the vehicle in neutral (N) and let the engine slow down, does the sound change? If not, the sound is probably related to the vehicle speed (since the vehicle does not slow down quickly as the engine does in neutral). By using logic and working to isolate the cause of the problem, one can zero in on the exact area to be addressed.

 

The alternative, which I used to have to challenge in the factory setting, was what was called “shotgunning.” When a tech started “shotgunning”, he would just start changing parts until the circuit behaved properly. (Sometimes this was affectionately called the “guess and miss” method of repair work.) Eventually, “shotgunning” worked, but it was seldom quick or efficient. Many good parts were replaced. The tech would never know for sure he had corrected the problem since he did not really know the source of the problem.

 

When I designed airborne radar receivers we normally used five or six amplifiers in a row to amplify the reflected signal. (A radar system sends out a burst of radio frequency energy and then listens for the reflection or echo. The reflected signal is very small (typically a few microvolts) and has to be amplified considerably where it can be processed.) Since the reflected system could vary a lot in magnitude (depending upon the distance and size of the object reflecting the signal), we had to control the amplifier’s amplification (turn the gain up or down). Obviously, that had to be done automatically with an AGC (Automatic Gain Control) circuit.

 

If we had a radar receiver that had a low output, often the tech would change the AGC circuitry thinking that was the problem. Usually, the problem was that one of the string of amplifiers was not working and the AGC circuit was not able to adjust the gain (amplification) properly. I would have them check before and after each amplifier to see that each was indeed increasing the signal. If they found an amplifier that was not amplifying, then they found the “smoking gun” and could replace it to correct the problem. 

 

The steps in troubleshooting are simple, just locate the problem (or potential problem) and then correct it. Making changes or replacing parts is not a good way to work. Those same troubleshooting techniques I learned long ago have served me well over the years.

 

I remember working on a washing machine not too long ago. The machine would not empty the water. I checked the circuit that turned the pump on and it seemed to be working. I measured the pump windings and they seemed ok (i.e., they were not burned out), so that indicated that the pump may have been mechanically bound (maybe seized bearings or something binding the impellor). We took the pump apart and sure enough, a screw (probably from a boy’s pocket) had managed to work its way through a screen designed to keep debris out of the pump impeller and bound the pump. We removed the screw and everything worked like it should. Of course, we could have replaced the pump control circuitry and the pump for several hundred dollars and a week or so wait for the parts. We might have even decided to simply replace the washer. However by troubleshooting (locating the problem), we were able to fix it for zero dollars and a couple of hours work.

 

Troubleshooting skills can be useful in many places including home building. A good builder can look at plans or problems and sometimes see problem areas that have escaped others. Be sure you select a builder who can troubleshoot accurately. You don’t want “shotgunners” working on your projects. 

 

Those same skills are needed for tasks such as repairing a crack in a wall. Of course, you can just patch the crack and hope for the best or you can troubleshoot: figure out why the wall cracked. Once you know why, you can fix that and then patch the crack with confidence it won’t open again. The “shotgun” approach would be patch the crack on a regular basis. You don’t want a builder who “shotguns.”