Why is blogging so hard?

Man, it seems like the whole blogging thing is just a breeze for so many people. I'm not one of them.

I have studied free material, paid hefty money for classes, tried just pushing through. Yet here I am finally working on an update weeks later. 

As I write this I'm sitting in the area of "Gate C11 at the PDX airport in Portland Oregon waiting for my last leg home. 

The last day and a half was spent working in a committee helping to plan "The Rental Show 2017" which will be held in Orlando Florida. An event put on by the American Rental Association, it is consistantly touted as one of the top 100 shows in the nation for size. I can tell you my first trip there back in 2010 was an eye opener to say the least.

ARA headquarters is in Moline Ill.. Like I'm sure many places across the USA this community sitting alongside the Mississippi River was a great place to visit. It is also home to John Deere and has some pretty cool museums displaying equipment clean back to the birth of the company. 

This takes me to another mechanic tip. Advancements in technology can leave a person who is new to the field feeling overwhelmed. Where ever possible take the time to study where it all originated from. Looking at the high tech components in a lot of today's equipment can be mesmerizing. When fuel injection was becoming mainstream I remember thinking, "What is going on inside that magic black box"? Turns out it is just doing some math and deciding how long the injector stays open. 

Literally, that's it. 

It is going to open the same number of times every time the motor makes two revolutions, so the only thing to control was how long it stays open when it does open. It figures this out by knowing air temperature, engine temp., RPM's, throttle position, manifold pressure, and some various specific to manufacture parameters, but it is just doing math and controlling how long..

That's just when it is in open loop! Once it goes closed loop the "black box" adjusts how long the injector stays open based on feedback from the O2 sensor. As long as no weird feedback is coming back from the other sensors, it bases its decisionn purely based on O2 feedback. 

Seperate the fuel injection out from the other functions like ignition timing, transmission shift points and torque converter lockup, or the host of other computer controlled functions. Look at each individually and it gets a lot simpler. 

The coolest thing about all of this as it applies to the equipment rental profession? 

We're seeing now what the heavy equipment industry and automotive industry got to work the kinks out of over the past several years.

Small engine fuel injection, tier 4 diesel emission equipment and more are proven technologies. We get the benefit of more power, better fuel efficiency and long lasting engines thanks to them pioneering the way for us. 

When I started this blog I had every intention on doing it daily, are there any volunteers out there that want to be my accountability partner? 

Tim Allen