Cam, crank and a slipped timing belt: Phil Rutt's PicoScope lessons
Two quick workshop clips, one about a common fault code and one about a running compression test, carried a test-equipment channel far past the car channels its size.
Pico Automotive Diagnostics
Story of Why this story? The whole channel is running at 691,968 views a day, 70 times a normal day (9,946).
Among the car channels nearest its size, from Joe Achilles to Tyre Reviews, none passed a hundred thousand views on the day. Pico Automotive Diagnostics, the channel of the company behind PicoScope, the oscilloscope many mechanics plug into a misbehaving engine, drew close to 700,000. Its usual day brings about ten thousand.
Two short lessons from Phil Rutt did most of the work. The first, posted on October 1, takes on a fault code that plenty of workshops know: cam and crank correlation. Rutt captures the camshaft, crankshaft and ignition signals side by side, then lays on-screen rulers across them to compare tooth counts and timing with reference data. It is a way of checking for a mechanical problem such as a timing belt that has slipped.
Five days later came the compression test. Here Rutt fits the WPS500X pressure transducer to a 1.6 FSI petrol engine, one of Volkswagen Group's direct-injection units, and records a running compression waveform. The description asks what such a test can show beyond a single compression number, and the answer is in the trace: the moments the inlet and exhaust valves open and close.
The same week held a quieter milestone. The PicoScope Waveform Library, built from captures its users send in, passed 15,000 waveforms, and Rutt's short tour of how to search it and add to it has drawn under a thousand views. A few days earlier, as we reported here, Steve Smith was shaking a metal strap into resonance at Automechanika Frankfurt. The company's motto, printed on its welcome video, sums up all of it: "Test not guess."
Published on Trari
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- Channel
- Pico Automotive Diagnostics
- Subscribers
- 318,000 ▲ 3,000 this week
- Channel views, last 7 days
- 810,319
- Channel views, pace per day
- 691,968 (on a normal day: 9,946)
The numbers
For a channel built on training videos for technicians, a day this size is far outside the routine, and the car channels around it had ordinary days.
💡 Test your knowledge
In a four-stroke engine, how fast does the camshaft turn compared with the crankshaft?
Each valve opens once every two crankshaft turns in a four-stroke cycle, so the camshaft turns once for every two turns of the crank.