In 1998, I trained a new employee. He had practiced on lots of hoods but had never tried a door. I was working on BMW 5 series with hail at the time. I showed him how to get his tool in the door with the window down and told him to “feel around” and see if he could get to the dent.
I was distracted by the headliner removal and left him to it.
All of a sudden, I heard a snap. I knew it wasn’t broken glass, but this couldn’t be good.
BMW’s use a cable and pulley system to raise and lower the windows.
Somehow, my trainee hooked the cable with his tool and snapped it off it’s the pulley. Thus the loud noise.
It took me a full day to get the door apart and put it back in place.
This car had no side air bags, so, why am I telling you this story?
To urge caution when you work inside a cavity you can’t see. Good to know what’s inside.
How? After wedging it open a bit, shine a light inside if you can. Have a look at the mechanisms you might harm by prying against them.
Even when a car has side airbags, you won’t see any sensors in the window cavity. This area would be damaged in a crash.
You will find some doors have airbags in the door panels. Most use a side curtain style and this puts it above the door frame behind the headliner.
Airbag wires and sensors can be identified by their orange or yellow sleeves. It is good practice not to bother these or pinch them in any way.
Car makers are very careful about wire placement so it is rare you would run into a wire.
How do they work?
A little air bag 101 will put your mind at ease when you work around them.
Air bags explode when an accelerometer senses a crash. In the 90’s, these were little gold plated balls inside a case. They were held in place by a magnet. When a sufficient force happened to the car (a wreck) the ball would roll forward and short two contacts, sending a signal to the air bag module. These were placed toward the front of the car.
Accidental firings were minimized by a safeing sensor. This was usually an identical sensor placed farther back than the front one. The air bag module would measure the time difference between the two sensor signals and fire or not fire the bag.
If it fires the module sends 12 volts to the igniter behind the bag and it will explode. If you ever launched model rockets, you have witnessed a similar event. Airbags fire much faster though. All this happens within 20 thousandths of a second. Takes you longer to blink. I’m not kidding.
By 30 thousandths of a second, the air bag is already deflated.
The propellant used most often is Sodium Azide. When it burns, it puts off nitrogen. No harm done breathing it. If you have seen a bag deployed you might have noticed white dust. This is talcum used to lubricate the bag.
Newer cars use heated argon gas. Also harmless.
There have been some deaths from air bags mostly due to being too close or not wearing a seat belt.
Auto companies have added some innovations to make air bag deployment safer.
Many side air bags are two stage. The severity of the crash determines if both stages are needed or just one.
Also, they no longer use the rolling ball sensor. Instead the use solid state accelerometers which measure the force in levels. This is far better than just the on or off states of the old ones.
As you can see working around them warrants caution. So what can you do to protect yourself? If you remove a door panel with an air bag in it, never lay it down on its face and work over it. If it went off, it could launch. Same goes for steering wheels. If you remove a column with an air bag, don’t set it down on the wheel with the column up in the air.
What about unhooking the battery? This might seem wise except the module has its own battery as a back up.
Also some cars have to have the airbag light reset at the dealer if the battery is disconnected.
Pay attention to the trim you remove. Is it designed to fail or split in an air bag event? Be cautious to re-install these pieces just as they came from the factory.
My wife was helping me remove a headliner from a Lexus GS 430. The impact wrench was on tighten. When she tried to remove the bolt from the upper “A” or windshield panel, they snapped. Wasn’t hard to break them, they were designed to fail to release the trim. Bless her heart.
In a case like this you would never want to replace these with any old bolt. We were sure to order those babies from the factory.
We have now worked on a large number of cars with side airbags. It really hasn’t changed much that we do, nor has it blocked our access to the dents. Mainly we just use more caution with trim.
In 2003, we worked a pretty good storm here. One car, a late model Volvo, lost it’s battery charge. This car came from a body shop, and no one could remember the light being on. It was then I learned that it would require a trip to the dealer.
Body shop owner called and said dealer couldn’t reset light. Their computer showed a severed wire in the air bag harness and it couldn’t be spliced. Had to order a whole new harness and replace it. Final bill was $2300 bucks. Fortunately the car paid close to $2900. It was a wash.
The tech didn’t think it was possible he damaged it and didn’t remember being anywhere near the airbag wires.
The following week, we wound up with an identical car in the shop for hail repair. When we tore it down, we could see there was no way we had harmed it.
I called the body shop owner and told him I smelled a rat. He didn’t want us to stir things up with the dealer so we paid it and went on. Next time you can bet I’ll high tail it down to the dealer and make them show me where it was cut.
There’s a good lesson in this. I have a friend who moved here from Chicago to bail out a company called Otasco. This was a chain of tire and supply stores mainly in Oklahoma. They were in bankruptcy and my friend ran the numbers and figured he could turn it around. When he arrived things were much worse than he thought. They ultimately went under. Because he agreed to be paid in stock, he took a loss of $100,000.00.
Win some lose some he thought. Besides, he would just write it off his taxes. Wrong. Stock losses are limited to $3000 write off per year. He just shrugged it off and laughed at claiming it for the next 30 years.
Then he said something I’ll never forget.
“If you’re going to fly with the big dogs, you’d better learn to poop like them.”
This was the phrase I repeated to myself as I paid the Volvo air bag wiring harness bill.
It’s also why I don’t disconnect batteries.
Don’t be afraid of Air bags
I won’t say nothing can go wrong because it sometimes does. But air bags shouldn’t stop you from working on a car. Accidental air bag deployment by a PDR technician is not likely. For one, even if you struck the sensor with your hammer, the air bag module knows the car is not in motion.
Second, if you accidentally shorted the wires somehow, no voltage can flow past a short. Also no voltage is present until the module sends it to the igniter. You would just be shorting two dead wires.
So use common sense. Understand what we do is not without risk, but we can minimize it. And most of all, charge enough for what you do. Making good money by winning most of the time sure takes the sting out of a rare mishap.
If employees don’t like something, it probably works
I’m a sucker for advertising. This links back to selling. Usually a good salesman appreciates a good pitch. If the product is good, I appreciate it. If the pitch is good, sometimes I just like that.
So I tried the Crunch Wrap at Taco Bell while visiting NY this summer. It’s filled with Sour Cream, cheese-like sauce and beef. All the essential ingredients needed to maintain my poor health. Yummy.
It didn’t stay on the menu for long. One of their limited time promotions I guess.
Works pretty good cause they brought it back and I returned to get one.
This small town I live in is more a suburb of Tulsa than a real town, but T-Town’s far enough that I don’t go in unless I have to.
Being in the fast food haven of America, you still get the major fast food places even in the smallest towns. Probably why Oklahoma is climbing quickly up the most Obese state scale.
Makes me proud to know all the fast food places test here first. We got the McRib fore you did. Nyeah.
If you hang around me for long you know there are business lessons everywhere you go. Even Taco Bell.
Jenks is small but they have a big 6A high school with 1000 plus kids attending.
I asked the pimply faced kid who took my order at Taco Bell if they had a big lunch rush at school.
“Don’t know. Don’t go to school,” he muttered.
I ordered the Crunch Wrap Supreme and this launched him into a tirade.
“I’d like to strangle the guy that came up with those Crunch Wraps”, he volunteered.
I had to ask why. Turns out they’re hard to make.
“Besides, everybody wants one. We have to make them all the time,” he griped.
Ah. There’s the lesson. If the employees don’t like it, then it’s probably something good.
What if Taco Bell listened to the whines of their workers? Might tempt them to drop a hot selling item. If those things weren’t so blasted hard to make, that kid might stay one day longer.
Oh yeah. Don’t forget about turnover. Average worker lasts about 2 months. Can’t listen to them.
I hope your turnover rate’s not that high. Still it should give you pause. Nobody gonna stay with you forever. Be careful about taking their advice.
There was a time when I was deeply affected by other’s whinings. Even some who had nothing to do with my business. I have learned to prune these unfruitful offerings from my life. I appreciate their intention and tell them so. But if it don’t fit or they’re not qualified to make such an assertion I forget about it as quickly as possible.
Taco Bell only cares about what their customer’s want. So should you. If it sells, keep doing it.
Another example came last summer at a nearby Donut Shop. They were trying to capture the big drink buyer by offering a 44oz cup of soda for a buck.
I pointed to the sign and ordered a Diet Coke.
The owner repied in a thick accent, “Are you kidding? It take all day to fill up with Diet! You have to buy bottle.”
Oh, Ok. Take too long. Never mind what sign say. Give me bottle.
I’m easy going (usually) and I know Diet sodas fizz like crazy. So I forgave his retraction of offer. But again, what’s worth more? His time or my business?
His thinking is flawed and it’s caused by the fact that he’s the owner and he’s also the employee. When you’re both, you will put your needs/wants ahead of your customers.
The pizza market here is dominated by Mazzio’s. The other day I was there and noticed they installed a new kind of fountain dispenser. It was only on the diet nozzle and it filled my glass without fizzing at all. So they solved that problem.
What’s interesting is they didn’t really have to. Mazzio’s is a fill your own drink kind of place. Why should they care how long it takes to fill your own cup? Because they know who the customer is. They care enough to keep the line at the drink fountain as short as possible. More customers flow through smoothly and come back again and again.
When I first began I had a real servant’s attitude. I would give rides or go get cars.
My first employee found this “annoying”.
“If they want us to fix it they can bring it to us.”
They can also take it somewhere else. To another company who shows they want the business.
New video: SUV headliner
How do you work with rear a/c?
Can you take the back glass off by yourself?
Why would you want to?
Where’s the hidden clip?