None of the places I worked at during my first decade had one... I had to learn later on... ost of the folks around me struggled just to turn it on.
Cleaning up my EB watch list...
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Ripinator
Old Man with a Hat
Yep. I observed the same thing. Most mechanics did their tune-ups with a timing light and a dwell meter (especially for Chebbys). They would watch the dwell angle, as they turned the points adjusting screw through that little window in the side of a GM distributor cap. Usually, they used a flexible screwdriver with a little allen-head on it. I think that big Sun machine musta been pretty intimidating to those guys.
Man I must be old, when I worked as a mechanic that big one was hood up every tune up, that was early 80's.
Yep... if you're old enough to remember one of these in use, chances are your old. At tens of thousands of dollars, lots of mom and pops just couldn't afford them... I think the shops that did mostly didn't get their guys trained or intimidated them too much to poke around with it until they learned.
In the Ford dealership with about 100 techs in 2 buildings, maybe 10% of us would even touch the scopes. We had 2, a 12volt powered ignition scope similar to the red one I posted, and the motorcraft one which had the ability to time the DIS cam sensors on the conversion engines.
Had a fun day with the first time I did that. A local radiator shop took on a car with a failed syncronizer (bottom half of a distributor, with a hall effect sensor on top)... they figured out they couldn't do the job after a couple days of trying... towed it to the dealer. I installed the syncronizer, used the alignment tool to put the cam sensor in close to correct timing and then used the scope to adjust it while the software looked at 6ish inputs.
The dummies at the radiator shop over charged the customer and blew their estimate for $$ and time... the customer refused the repair. They brought it back to the dealer, I removed it and reinstalled the original I dug out of the trash. They towed the car back to their shop, where the customer had it towed back to me... to reinstall and retime the syncronizer... at least parts was nice enough to let the radiator shop have credit on the part, since it was sold to the same car twice.
I was paid 3 times and had become quite proficient at the task by the end.
