Brain Damaged Engineering

I spent most of today working what should have been a fairly simple project in my shop. I was helping my neighbor change the front rotors and brake pads on a 1990 Honda Accord. Generally speaking, disc brake work is some of the easier work to do on a car. Turns out, the 1990-1997 Accord rotors are attached in the most incomprehensible way. Most cars and trucks have their rotors held onto the hubs by the wheel studs and the calipers. Removal of the rotors consists of 2 or 3 steps. Step 1: remove the wheel. Step 2: remove the two bolts that hold the caliper to the spindle. In some cases, a step 3 is required to remove the spindle nut and the rotor (with bearings) comes off.

In any case, every disc brake assembly that I've ever worked on was quite painless to remove. This includes the super heavy duty rotors on my Ford F-250 4x4. Turns out, the rotors on a 1990 Honda Accord are held onto the car with more bolts and more resistance than those on the 8,800 pound F-250.

So, the steps to remove the rotors are, step 1: remove the wheel. Step 2: remove the two bolts that hold the caliper to the spindle. Step 3: remove the axle hub nut. Step 3: push the axle back out of the spindle as far as possible. Step 4: using a E12 (reverse torx socket) undo 4 bolts on the back of the spindle holding the hub and rotor assembly to the spindle. As if step 4 wasn't hard enough, its at this point that things get really ugly. I could go on with the details, but that really isn't the point.

The point I'm trying to make is what possible good engineering went into designing something like this? It can't even be argued that it is done for the sake of generating business for the dealership. There are no special tools really required (although there is one that helps), it is just an exercise in disassembly of the front end. Generally speaking Honda is known for their well built cars and the quality engineering that goes into them. The rotors are still not separated from my neighbors spindles, but we are making progress, maybe day 2 will see it finished.

On a similar note, I brought my grandmother's 1968 Ford Mustang down to the shop last summer for long term storage. Grandma can't drive anymore so the car needed some attention to keep it from completely biodegrading. Since the car hadn't been started in years, before I started it, I wanted to prime the oil system. Generally speaking, this involves pulling the distributor out of the engine and spinning the oil pump with a drill for a couple minutes to push oil through the system. Older Fords are known for being PITA's to work on but very little could prepare me for what ended up happening to me.

The car has a 289 small block which has the distributor in the front of the engine and it is a giant engine bay in those early Mustangs. It should have been no big deal to do this. I marked the position of the distributor cap, then marked the position of the rotor once the cap was off and pulled the distributor. As I pulled it about half way out, I heard something drop down inside. Not having spent much time working on Ford motors, I wasn't sure what that was, but pulled the distributor out without much further thought. I brought over the drill with the oil primer I had bought from Summit, stuck it down into the galley and proceeded to spin the drill. Pretty quickly the drill slowed down due to the resistance of turning the primed pump.

It was now time to drop the distributor back into the engine. Everything was lined up and even put a bit of assembly lube on the distributor gear to make things go smoothly. Nothing doing. I was used to Chevy motors, so I got the flash light to see how much I'd have to turn the oil drive shaft to get it to line up. Turns out, the shaft is a 1/4" hex drive and it sits loose in the oil pump. In other words, the stupid thing can tilt off center by about 15-20 degrees. The bottom of the distributor does have taper cuts, presumably to slip the drive shaft back in when reinstalled, however, this was of near zero value. Long story short, I spent about 4 hours attempting to get the shaft and distributor to line up. Eventually, I got it done, but ended up being 1 tooth off of the timing gear. Fortunately there was enough slack in all of the plug wires that I was able to rotate it to get the timing back. I firmly believe that the engineer responsible for the decision to use a floppy, loose fitting hex drive mechanism out to be drawn and quartered.

So the question I have is, where is the accountability for poor engineering? In the world of professional engineers, if I make a stupid mistake that causes people substantial problems or things can't be built properly, my company has to pay for the problems. We call it "errors and omissions" and we carry insurance to cover those types of things. Where is the accountability for other types of engineers?