Electrical fault diagnosis
The fault that three garages could not find: measured on the circuit rather than guessed at from a code, and written down when it is found.
Goshen, New York · since 2009
About the workshop
The electrical fault the garage could not find — on cars, on trucks and on machinery that has to be running by Friday.
How it started, which is the honest version
Ray Kessler spent eleven years in a truck shop on the Route 17 corridor and then a season watching a neighbour's combine have four new parts fitted and keep stopping. The fault was a conductor broken inside insulation that looked perfect, and it took an afternoon with a meter to find once somebody looked at the circuit instead of the catalogue. That is the whole business plan, and it has not changed since 2009.
The bench room came later, and it was the customers' idea rather than a plan. Contractors kept arriving with a control unit a dealer had called no longer available, and a large share of those units had failed in one of a small number of repairable ways and went back working with their original programming. Word about that travels faster in this county than any advertisement, and it is now a third of the work — including units posted in by other workshops, which is a normal thing in this corner of the trade. The worked example of one of those jobs is a composite, like every case study here, and says so on its page.
What the place actually is
- One bay deep enough for a tractor unit, with a pit at the back of it
- A bench room with an extraction arm, a microscope and a hot-air station, which is where module work happens
- A parts wall of connector bodies, terminals, relays, cable and sleeving, so most repairs finish the same day
- Two service vans, each carrying a scope, a power supply, a press and enough cable to rebuild a loom section in a field
- No showroom, no waiting room and nobody whose job is to answer the door — if the bay is empty we are out in it
Two thirds of the work happens somewhere else.
Machinery is seen where it stands. Trucks and machinery are seen where they stand, because a machine in a field cannot come to a workshop and a truck standing still is losing money by the hour. Cars and vans are usually quicker and cheaper here. Bench work on a control unit only happens at Hatfield Lane.
What it is not
Not a garage. There is no mechanical work here, no hydraulics, no bodywork and no glass, and the reason to have a specialist do electrical diagnosis is that they are not also trying to be a general workshop that afternoon. Not an inspection station. And not a shop that will go inside the high-voltage traction system of an electric or hybrid vehicle — the twelve-volt side of one is ordinary work and all of it is done here.
The whole boundary, with who does the rest
This is not a garage. We do not do mechanical repair, hydraulics, brakes, bodywork or glass. When an electrical symptom turns out to have a mechanical cause we say so in writing and it goes back to your own garage with the measurement attached.
What we work on
Seven things, and one of them is rarer than the rest
Starting and charging
Why it will not turn over, why the battery is flat on Monday, and which of the four things in that circuit is actually at fault.
Wiring, looms and connectors
Chafed harnesses, corroded pins, rodent damage and the joins somebody made with a scotch-lock in a hurry three winters ago.
Control modules and board-level repair
The unit most shops only replace, opened on a bench and repaired at component level — which also means it keeps the programming it already has.
Truck and commercial electrics
Twenty-four volt starting and charging, trailer wiring and ABS, body and PTO controls, and the lighting that has to work before it moves.
Agricultural machinery
Tractors, combines, balers and sprayers: monitors, sensors, guidance wiring, and the harness that has spent its life in dust, chaff and vibration.
Auxiliary installations
Cameras, work lighting, beacons, trackers, inverters and fridges — fused properly, taken from the right supply, and not spliced into the first wire that had power on it.
Why Goshen
Cars, trucking and farming in the same twenty miles
Orange County is one of the few places within reach of New York City where all three exist at once: arable and dairy farms, a haulage corridor along Route 17, and enough small commercial vehicles to fill the weeks between. A workshop that does all three is normal here and would be strange in most places.
The practical version of that is seasonal. Winter and spring are vans, cars and bench work. From the middle of July the machinery takes over, and one of us is on call in the evenings and at weekends until the end of October.
Who the customers are
Arable and mixed farms
Everything is decided by a fortnight in August. The electrical work worth buying is the work done in February, and the callout is what happens when that did not get done.
Dairy and livestock
The load runs all year and the environment is wet and corrosive. Loaders, feeders and yard equipment fail at the connectors long before they fail anywhere else.
Agricultural contractors
Machines that work seven days a week for ten weeks and then stand. Vibration damage arrives quickly and rodent damage arrives during the standing.
Owner-operators and small fleets
Downtime is the entire cost, so almost all of this is done in the yard. Twenty-four volt charging and trailer couplings are two thirds of it.
All seven, and what each changes
This is a demonstration website. Woodside Auto & Ag Electric is not a real business, an enquiry sent from this site reaches only a demonstration mailbox, not a workshop, and the telephone number is a placeholder. It was built to show what a small specialist workshop gets for a fixed price.
$145 a workshop hour · $185 on site · agreed before it starts
Describe the symptom, or just telephone
The symptom check takes about three minutes and gives you a written summary of which circuits would be tested first and why, with the hours and the published rate against each. It is an indicative scope and not a diagnosis — nobody has seen the vehicle — but it is a better opening than a blank contact form. If you would rather skip it, the telephone works.