Working in garden, one of the most technical things a customer can expect of you is determining which spark plug their machine takes. Often times you'll have little or nothing to go on; in the best of circumstances they will bring in their old battered one with the model number still legible, in the worst, simply the name of the manufacturer. In these cases, I'll find myself caught up in some frantic sleuthing on my personal cell phone, corroborating the photograph of the customer's possible machine, scouring the net for the elusive product or part manual, determining if their specific model uses a briggs and stratton or honda engine, then deconstructing the mower brand's replacement part number into the engine manufacturer's OEM spark plug model identifier, and lastly finding the alternative spark plug which we sell on spark plug cross reference dot com.

There used to exist a book which we kept on the bay, which while limited and out of date, could reduce the amount of steps to one or two. Most importantly, this is NOT information which any sane human being could possibly memorize by experience, so having to do the whole dance every time is kind of frustrating. I like helping the customer so I do it every time, but it would be nice if there was some kind of online database which made this a bit easier. Any of you old hands ever seen it or made it a thing?