It’s automotive related because the pneumatic tools used in car shops are loud and after all these years of use . . most of the early years without earplugs . . it’s VERY topical for us moldy oldy car guys.
and I’m just a parts guy at the service shop parts counter . . .
. . compounding my thirty years of weekend guitar playing !
After ten years off from the music scene, my tinnitus is mild to medium . . . and yet . . when a shop tech has a loud air chisel or steel on steel pounding . . it ‘‘WAKES UP’’ the tinnitus for a few hours .
as it is right now , this minute, it sounds as though someone is turning a brake rotor in the back shop.
Amen brother! You got that right. I’m 46, getting a little thick around the middle, but can still crank out flat-rate with the best of them. I can bang out a set of ball joints on that F-450 in an hour and a half, do a Taurus heater core in about the same, and can still put in a full day and go home without any aches or pains anywhere. But not a day goes by that I don’t realize how quickly that can all end. I see guys 10 years my junior who struggle to get going in the morning and can’t make it home before popping 4 Advil. I consider myself very lucky that I can also do the less physically demanding automotive jobs. I’m the go-to diag guy for electrical, emissions, and the like where the heaviest thing you lift is a scan tool. I can also get an office job as a service writer. But for many of us that’s not an option. And I tell the younger guys to learn and grow and be able to do the mental aspects of auto mechanics. You just don’t see 63 year old heavy-line techs or body men. There’s a reason for that.
Seems to me the 40’s are the best years for mechanics. We’ve got enough experience and feel to be quick and efficient, and are still young enough to do the heavy lifting.
I don’t have tinnitus but I do have a lot of hearing loss. It was tested at 35% when I applied for a school bus driving job 20 years ago. The limit was 40%. I don;t know what made them think that hearing was an asset for a school bus driver, you couldn’t hear a brass band marching by from inside a running bus back then.
My hearing loss was from driving old noisy trucks. Some of them had a single exhaust stack ending less than a foot from the drivers left ear. Some of the trucks I drove predated WWII.
Yep , ears ring all the time but I don’t let it really bother me . Sometimes louder than others or maybe I just notice it more at times . I firmly believe shooting without proper protection caused my problem . As far as I know there’s really not much can be done about it but the hearing specialist said if it really bugged me , maybe hearing aids would help . I have to not rev my Hupmobile too much or it really sets me off .
Actually I remember my mother laughing about a Hupmobile her & my father once owned . She said dad swore that in cold weather he could crank that thing till the water boiled in the radiator & it wouldn’t hit a lick . Hand crank engine I guess .
Does anyone actualy hear ‘ringing’ in their ears? The noise that I hear is more of a whistling sound.
And I guess that my acquired tallents at driveability and electrical diagnosis allowed me to make a decent living my last few years in the shop @asemaster. My friends/competitors who remain in the business have all become office help and managers and even those responsibilities keep them regular customers at Walgreens. It’s hard to believe that I once drug a TH-350 onto my belly and rolled under a truck on a creeper and hung it.
The last car my grandfather owned was a Hupmobile. He was staying with some friends in what is now Allegany State Park. People were being evicted from their land to create the park and many were refusing to move. He had his car in their barn and they all went into town on a Saturday night in the family’s car. While they were gone the Sherrif’s department came and set fire to the house and barn. Don’t know what year that was but The park was dedicated in 1921.
PS, even though spell check does not like it, that is the right way to spell Allegany in NY State. It is the way the County , the township and the state park are spelled.
The park is in neither the county or township.
I have tinnitus and it is directly related to cars. I worked around jets for my 20 years in the Navy, but I always wore hearing protection. At my annual physical at 19 years, I still had near perfect hearing, best in my shop. The younger guys were losing their hearing to listening to their walkman’s at too high a volume.
But my last two years were at a duty station 900 miles from home. I did not sell my house and move, just to have to move again in two years, one of which I was out to sea. So every chance I got, I’d drive home for a day or two. Then my AC quit, in summer, in the south, in my 79 Dodge Colt. I drove home with the window down and didn’t realize the damage it was doing until I got home and I was deaf in my left ear.
Over the next 24 hours, the hearing returned in my left ear, most of it anyway, but it came back with a friend. I used a cotton ball to return to the ship. At my last physical, I had a 40dB loss in my left ear above 2kHz. The left ear has slowly gotten worse in the 30 years since.
I also have bilateral hearing loss, and I’ve worn hearing aids for at least 15 years now (I’m 70). Most common hearing loss is in the highest frequencies, and that makes it hard to hear people who whisper a lot, and people would have higher pitched voices. My 4 year old granddaughter might as well be speaking Mandarin to me, most of the time.
Hearing loss makes certain aspects of repairing cars harder. Listening to an engine as you fiddle with a carburetor is tough. Trying to locate a rattle can be very hard. I can’t hear the sound of the warning from disk brake pads that are wearing out.
Tinnitus is constant, but MUCH better when I wear the hearing aids. At night it’s very loud, but mostly I seem to ignore it. Tonight it will bother me, because it will be on my mind, but mostly I just forget about it. My hearing doctor (MD) told me that people with high frequency hearing loss may have tinnitus because the brain is making up the high notes that the ears can’t pass along any more. Sort of like phantom pain in an amputated leg. That’s not science, that’s theory, but it seems possible.
And, you all should understand that Social Security also pays Disability benefits, and they consider your age, education and work experience. If you are over 55 and can’t do what they call light work (stand 6 hours a day, lift and carry 10 pounds often, 20 occasionally) and don’t have skills that you can take into other work without more training, you are probably “disabled”. That’s how it deals with the people who do heavy physical work.
Interesting, research has shown that most people who have tinnitus hear whispers better than normal speech.
But people are affected differently. My Father In Law had it real bad and would not wear a hearing aid. He could not hear most people even when they were yelling in his face, yet he could hear his wife who had a high pitched squeaky voice perfectly. And he could hear loud whispers somewhat. There are fewer high frequency components in a whisper.
Seems like everyone here has this.
Me too. For the last 10 years.
Can’t help blabbing on. “Does anyone actually hear ringing?” Yeah its like when you shot a shot gun without any ear protection (which we never did), you would hear the ringing for a little bit after that.
So you pay $50-100 (or more) for concert tickets and wear ear plugs? How does that work?
I did take a class at work on dealing with hearing impaired. One method to use when someone says “what?” is to never just repeat the same thing the same way again. Change the wording and inflection. Women for some reason like to get high and soft when they get to the main point of something and is totally not understandable. Then they never again repeat the main point which is a mistake. I had a boss like that and a pastor like that now. I try to explain this to my wife but she just repeats the same line three times the same way, then gets frustrated and tells me to get a hearing aid. I just say spell it.
I call it ringing although now that I’m actually listening to it & trying to decide exactly what it does sound like , it may be more of a high pitched whistling noise .
My father in law had a hard time understanding what people were saying. Once he said “I can hear you, I just can’t understand what you are saying”. It’s counterintuitive but sometimes they can actually understand you better if you whisper the words, this exaggerates the consonant sounds where a the speech information is. Also, the hard of hearing can understand you better if they watch you talk, using your mouth movements to fill in consonants they aren’t hearing.
Here’s a video demonstrating our eye’s ability to fill in missing sounds.
I had tinnitus to a small degree when I was a child and teenager. It’s been stated by some in the medical field that this can be caused by episodes during infancy or as a toddler of having high fevers or seizures; which I did have.
It got worse as an adult. Too many concerts, air tools, years of wind blast while motorcycling, and having a tendency to crank up both stereo and guitar amps at the house. The latter both have “11” on the volume control…
The one good thing out of it all (if you wanted to look at it that way…) is that I developed a feel for diagnosing car problems without hearing the actual noises. Much like a blind man who can hear better…
Many times I’ve been with someone in the car and pointed out noiseless issues they did not even know their cars had. Still, I’d trade it all back in to have decent hearing and to be rid of that herd of locusts going off in both ears 24/7…
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It is very true that different hearing loss will be countered with different frequencies.
PLUS . . speak slower . . .
that way the person can make sense of one word at a time.
THIS even works best with English as a second language. They may know a lot of English but have trouble picking through the jumble of words you just spit out . . slow down. ( I do this everyday with Navajo ,Spanish, and many other first languages. We both understand each other by just slowing down and sticking to rudimentary terms. )
AND, I’ve clearly seen it to be the root problem with police commands and the people not responding as they’d wish . . DUDE, . . just . . slow . . down !
I’m often amazed at what all I actually DO hear that others don’t. Most likely do to the frequency of the hearing loss vs the sounds being heard.
mine is a high pitched sound just right ear that comes and goes, usually nighttime. Slight hearing loss in right ear, attribute it to rifle shooting without ear protection. Maybe 2 octaves above the pitch of a mosquito.
Same here. Pushing toward 99% of us…
Tinnitus cures are the poster boys for “snake oil.”
Well, if anybody is willing to pay for a tinnitus snake oil cure, then I’ve got some high priced swamp land to sell 
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I just figured out that the sound is just like the sound I used to hear in a store that displayed and sold televisions that had cathode ray picture tubes. Of course, I couldn’t hear that today, even if they still sold those TV sets. Sylvania, RCA, Dumont in fancy wood cabinets.
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Your friend is in impressive company. Alan Shepard had that, which is why after his first suborbital flight he didn’t get back into space until very late in the Apollo program.
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