By Robert Bravender
Perhaps nothing better illustrates the paradigm shift in automotive repair from the mechanical to the electrical than the career of G. William Fay. Owner of Bill’s Auto Garage in Queen Creek, Ariz., Fay started his career in the aerospace sector “as a technician soldering circuit boards,” but now specializes in automotive diagnostics and drivability.
After serving for six years in the Marine Corps’ Communications-Electronics division, this Los Angeles native returned home to the private sector to help build fuel control systems for Pratt & Whitney 4000-series jet engines, but by 1990 the aerospace industry was drying up in southern California.
“I found myself with no job — but at the dawn of the computerized car age,” commented Fay. “I was in the unique position that I understood the electronics better than most mechanics did,” particularly when it came to diagnostics.
“I knew how to run a lab scope in 1986,” Fay recalled. “It wasn’t even really a diagnostic tool in automotive technology yet; people were using the big Sun tuning machines, watching primary and secondary ignition wave forms. But that didn’t do a lot for an ’88 Buick 3.8 which had a bad crank sensor in it, or a magnet falling off a cam sensor, or a distributor-less ignition system that wasn’t working correctly.”
“I think the whole industry was completely unprepared for…”
