Steve Smith shakes a metal strap into resonance at Automechanika Frankfurt

A trade-fair demo that drew a dozen views a day for weeks now shares a busy day with Phil Rutt's cam and crank lesson.

Channel: Pico Automotive Diagnostics Story of October 8, 2026Trari Newsroom

Why this story? The video is running at 135,759 views a day, 11685 times its usual pace (12).

Understanding Resonance with PicoScope NVH | Natural Frequency Explained #PicoScope #Mechanic

The prop is almost nothing: a metal strap, an accelerometer and a spinning shaft with a weight on it. At the Pico stand at Automechanika Frankfurt, Steve Smith first taps out the strap's natural frequency, 15.4 hertz, then works out how fast the off-balance shaft has to turn to hit that same note. As the shaft closes in on his number the strap starts to shake hard. Push the speed past it and the shaking falls away again.

That is the whole lesson in resonance, and it went up on the Pico Automotive Diagnostics channel in mid-September with very little notice. For weeks it drew around a dozen views a day. Then, in a single day, it picked up more than 130,000.

It was not the only video moving. "Cam & Crank Correlation with PicoScope," in which Phil Rutt lines up camshaft, crankshaft and ignition signals and uses on-screen rulers to check them against reference data, also jumped well past its usual pace and has passed 300,000 views. Rutt's running compression test on a 1.6 FSI petrol engine, posted only days ago, is not far behind.

This is the official channel of Pico Technology, the British company behind the PicoScope, and most of what it posts is short, practical training for technicians: how to save a waveform with its details, how to read valve events from a pressure trace. The resonance clip is a little different. It needs no car and no fault code, just a strap that visibly misbehaves at one speed and not at another. Perhaps that is why it carries further than a timing-belt diagnosis.

The comment section is still tiny. One viewer jokes that the team is turning into physicists, which, for a demonstration built on natural frequency, is close enough to the point.

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The numbers

Here are the figures behind a quiet September upload that suddenly started moving, alongside the channel's own cam and crank lesson.

views per day, this video

typical day

12

now

135,759

subscribers

315,000

no significant change in the last 7 days

total views

31,972,888

views per day

16,476

typical day: 9,221

the video

views

138,346

likes

325

comments

3

days online

26

compared with similar channels (subscribers)

9EPIC

327,000

McKillans

327,000

Pico Automotive Diagnosti…

315,000

Nick's Garage

311,000

Tyre Reviews

305,000

Oakland Auto Detail

302,000

As of October 8, 2026 · Data source: Trari Social News, Trari Traffic Trends and Ranking Platform, Google YouTube

Subscriber, view, like and comment counts are YouTube's. Rates, usual days, rankings, comparisons and categories are Trari's own calculations.

Where next?

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