PSA: I was sure those cheap code readers were junk, but one just saved my bacon

A regular customer came in with a rough idle on his 2012 F-150, and I was ready to start swapping parts. He had a $30 scanner from the parts store and said it showed a specific misfire code for cylinder 3. I was ready to dismiss it, but I hooked up my real scan tool and, sure enough, it gave me the same exact P0303 code. That little box pointed me right to a bad coil pack, fixed in under an hour. Has anyone else had a cheap tool surprise them like that, or did I just get lucky?

3 comments

3 Comments

quinncoleman12d ago

Been there for sure. My shop's fancy scanner died on a busy Saturday. Grabbed a buddy's cheapo unit from his trunk to finish a Honda diag. It pulled the same pending evap code our big machine did. Felt like a total win.

taylor_patel12d ago

Hah, that reminds me of my buddy's old shop. Their main computer went down right before a big state inspection on a fleet van. The apprentice had some basic code reader his dad gave him... it couldn't do much, but it cleared the check engine light long enough to pass the emissions part. Boss bought the kid lunch for a week.

phoenix_singh2512d ago

Nice save, but careful with that. A pending code is just a clue, not a full test. The real win is when the cheap tool can run the bi-directional controls to prove the fix.