Complexity Run Amuck

Hyundai Mystery Fuel Injector Shutdown - How Can We Fix It if It Won't Stay Broken?
Watch Wes Work

I've been watching a bunch of Watch Wes Work videos lately. He covers the gamut of automotive repairs, from patching up old rust buckets so they can limp down the road for another year to delving into instructable electronic nightmares, like this one. These kind of videos always remind me of the hangar scene from Star Wars:

Star Wars Echo Base

People working on complex machinery using more complex instruments. Come to think of it, it's very much like what the maintenance and repair guys do on fighter jets for the military.

Some problems with broken machinery are obvious, something is leaking or something is broken, but some problems, like the one in the video at top can benefit from some analysis. Sometimes a mechanic will just start replacing parts figuring that eventually one of them will fix the problem, but that can get very expensive. Analysis requires an intelligent and functioning brain. When I am sharp and motivated, problems like this are like a good meal: I gobble them up. If I am dragging and foggy, I will be stymied. I suspect this is why repair manuals have gotten so big, wait, what I am talking about? I haven't seen any new repair manuals, they've all been moved to digital versions where they can lay out all the steps required to diagnose the problem. Except they can't foresee every problem, so at some point they will simple direct the mechanic to replace a component.

New Common Rail System
(From the left: fuel pump, injector, and common rail)

Common rail direct fuel injection was a new term for me. It was originally used in WWI submarines. Denso pioneered it for use in automotive applications in 1995. It offers certain benefits but the part that struck me is the extraordinary pressures it operates at: 29,000 PSI (pounds per square inch) which is like ten times as much as a typical hydraulic system, which uses 2 or 3,000 PSI.