(Image: Taunton Daily Gazette) – Some good old fashioned BangShifty thinking brought on a visit from the bomb squad recently in Massachusetts. A garage in the town of Taunton purchased a used truck at auction and when they bought it back to the shop to be readied for resale, employees found something that looked like a pipe bomb hidden in the vehicle. Due to the times we live in and the fact that they had no idea what else to do, the police were contacted and they contacted the bomb squad. After taking all necessary precautions in pulling the device out, it was x-rayed and what did the x-ray show?
It showed the BangShifty solution to tire pressure monitors that either broke or were annoying the previous owner. He took a PVC pipe and put a cap on one end. He then loaded a couple of the sensors into the pipe and capped the other end, adding a fitting in order to pressurize the tube and fool the sensors into thinking that all was good in the tires. Apparently no one saw the device before the auction or during the auction.
Being that the tire pressure sensors are basically a pressure transducer that “talks” to the car via RF signal, as long as they are seeing the pressure they are supposed to be and are in range, they certainly do not have to be in the tires. We’re not sure if the owner of this truck didn’t want to dismount the tires to replace his sensors or perhaps the sensors were damaged but we do know that it was an easy fix to slap them in the tube with proper pressure to get the annoying light to shut off on the dash.
If you are worrying about his ability to check the tire pressure we’re thinking that a dude who knew enough to make this knows to check the air in his tires like motorists have been doing manually for 100 years…except those that drove Ford Explorers apparently.
Click here to see the Taunton Daily Gazette story
The bomb squad were so busy looking at this that they missed the 5 megaton nuclear device sitting in the luggage area!
There is a writeup on how to make that on instructables.com. Looks like the same one.
There was a guy that he put in his trunk a similar device for his P71 Crown Vic since the steel rims have a different style TPMS than the Mustang Wheels.
I have winter tires & rims for my DD, but was too cheap to spend the $$ to put TPMS on the winter wheels……..my solution for the dash light was to tear a strip of the cardboard off the pack of gum sitting in the console & place it over the light.
This guy (and instructables) are OVER THINKING the problem :):)
holy crap, the lawsuits that could come out of this.
TPMS: Another dashlight that means higher fees to pass inspection.
BINGO….
and price per unit because it’s “safety” related. How much safer do you think they’d be if people had to pay attention to drive again.
I have found one or more of my tires to be 20psi low and the dash light never came on. To me this means an expensive system in the guise of safety that never alerted when it should have.
I have taken them out for customer and put all 4 in the spare tire, All withing range to be picked up by the receiver and always have the same pressure no difference between them.
I put mileage on the customers oil stickers to tell them when to come in….they come in when the light comes on. Do you think these same people will check their tires? TPMS is great for the public. I just wish they all had 5 monitor systems because it sucks when the TPMS comes on, you stop to change the low tire before ruining it only to let the jack down and find the spare is flat!
This is a common practice when low profile tires are installed on big rims to replace the stock sized tires..the tire sidewall is so small there is no where to mount the sensor inside the wheel without it getting damaged.it tricks the vehicle into seeing that the sensors are present and working. It\’s done so the alarms stop going off in the message center
I’ll take “Why Beaver Martin doesn’t drive new cars?” for $200 Alex.