Dropped $400 on a snap-on scan tool and it paid for itself in one morning

I bought a used Snap-On scanner off a retiring mechanic for $400 last month, figured it was a gamble. Next day a 2015 F-150 rolls in with a no-start and the scanner found a bad crank sensor in under 2 minutes, saved me from chasing ghosts for hours. Has anyone else scored a deal on a used tool that just saved your bacon right out of the gate?

2 comments

2 Comments

the_kai10d ago

Wait did that scanner actually find the crank sensor problem on its own or did it just give you the code? I had a similar thing happen with a $150 diagnostic tablet I grabbed off Craigslist once. It was one of those cheap Chinese ones that supposedly works on everything but honestly the thing overheated like five minutes into using it. Still it found a bad fuel injector on a Honda Civic I was working on for a buddy and that saved me from taking apart the whole intake manifold for no reason. Actually now I'm thinking about that time I tried to fix a Ford Focus with a basic OBD2 reader and it just said "misfire detected" and I spent a whole day swapping coils and plugs before realizing it was a vacuum leak. So yeah sometimes even a cheap tool beats guessing but you gotta know what you're looking at too.

charlie26910d agoTop Commenter

Nah man you're totally right. Even a cheap scanner can save you hours of guessing if you know what the code actually means. That Ford Focus story hits close to home, I did the same thing on a Subaru once, swapped everything before figuring out it was just a loose hose. The key is having enough experience to know when the scanner is pointing you in the right direction versus when it's just giving you a generic symptom code. At the end of the day it's still just a tool, not a mechanic.