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Automotive Industry

Trade Secrets

Motor, Jul 2006 by Cerullo, Bob

Knowing exactly where every one of your shop's tools can be found prevents hours of wasted time each yean Having manuals and related paperwork within easy reach is icing on the cake.

It was at a pretty tender age that I discovered how much fun it was to hang around my dad's repair shop after school and summers. I learned to dodge the Labor Dept. inspector because in New York City you had to have working papers and were not allowed to work around machinery until yon were a certain age.

It didn't seem right to me that I was prohibited from "working" in the shop when I was 14 years old, because my dad had actually started the shop when lie was 14. By age 15 he had seven "mechanics working for him. (That's what they called technicians back then.)

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(Generally, I wasn't doing any major work in the shop. I was doing a lot of sweeping, a lot of cleaning and dusting off parts in the parts room. One of the jobs I liked was gathering up the metal grindings from the cylinder head lathe. My dad showed me that it you put some of those grindings on a piece of cardboard then ran a magnet around under die cardboard, yon could make the grinding dance. I showed that trick to my pals at school and was a big hit.

Most of the time I spent observing. I would look through the various instruction manuals that were lying around, trying to figure out how the machines worked. I longed for the day when 1 could actually get to use them. One of my favorites was the bright red cylinder-boring machine that had its own crane so it could be lilted onto the block, often with the engine still in the car.

I remember one day asking my dad about a particular box containing some strange-looking tools. He explained that they were for casting babbit bearings on old engines like the Ford Model A. I took it upon myself to mark the old wooden box. Eventually, the idea of marking the boxes with various special tools and machines became a regular part of my after-school "job." When a new tool or piece of equipment came in, I was in charge of marking the box and finding a special place for it.

One of the things I observed was that the manuals that came with many of the old tools had disappeared over the years. It became another one of my jobs to write letters to the companies that made the machines, asking for manuals. Often they sent them at no charge. My first great success was getting the manual for the shops big old Alien starter/generator testing machine. The men who used it knew how to work it to test the generators and starters they had rebuilt, but I wanted to read the manual. Actually, having the manual helped us all discover the purpose of some of the rarely used cables and adapters that were stored in the cabinet underneath the machine.

I started keeping the manuals in a file box. Then one day I came up with a way to catalog the shop's tools and equipment. With the enthusiastic encouragement of my dad and, I have to say, several of the men in the shop, I put together a loose-leaf book I called my "Tool-Finder." At first it was just loose-leaf paper with a description of the tool written on it. Then I moved up to plastic page-holders into which I would slip an advertisement or catalog page. I put the various tools in file dividers marked for the system they were used to repair. For example, the Wagner brake bleeder was placed under the file divider marked "Brakes." For the really old stuff, I would take a photo and slip that into the plastic sleeve. When guys in the shop started using the Tool-Finder, they called it "Bob's Tool-Finder Book." I was thrilled that they attached my name to it.

Over the years I have had to replace the loose-leaf binder several times. I gave that job to my son when he was a teenager. Not surprisingly, the system still works.

My Tool-Finder has served us well. Without a routine way of storing tools and equipment you rarely use, it's easy to lose track of where they are and what they're used for. Since in our shop the special tools and equipment items are purchased by the shop, there are several different people who need to know what they're used for and where they can be found. With the Tool-Finder, that can be accomplished quickly...provided the book is maintained.

An important part of the ToolFinder is a system of marking the storage boxes and where they're stored. For example, any tool or piece of equipment that relates to brakes would be labeled "B" and a number would be assigned. So the brake bleeder on which I etched the numbers (so they wouldn't get washed off by brake fluid) might be marked "B100." The location would be shelf A, bin 3. That same number would be listed in the Tool-Finder book on the page describing the brake bleeder. The idea would he that anyone-a helper, another tech or very often even the boss-would he able to find the tool right away and return the tool in its box to the proper shelf without having to ask anyone where it goes.

It was my dad's idea to have new employees spend some time thumbing through the Tool-Finder to quickly learn what tools and equipment we had in the shop and where they were.

Automotive Industry

Trade Secrets

Motor, Jul 2006 by Cerullo, Bob

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