asep-study: GM ASEP study guides, ASE prep and a bay generator

[!NOTE] This is one GM ASEP student's study workspace, shared with classmates. The guides are built from class notes, official ASE task lists and outside research with help from Claude (Anthropic). They are study aids, not service information. Check specs and procedures in GM SI before using them on a car.

Try the bay generator: flyboy-byte.github.io/asep-study

The bay generator gives you a week of random GM gas vehicles (2013–2026) that could roll into your bay, plus one harder technical report, the one you'd tell a friend about. Each car has an engine, mileage, whether warranty pays, and the customer's concern in their own words. It never gives the cause, because diagnosing it is your job. Regenerate the week, a single day or the report, sort the list, and copy any car straight into a text. Use Settings to move from city to farm country, change the town's size, or switch between a GM dealer and an independent shop, and the traffic changes the way it would in real life. It works on a phone too.

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Courses

	Exam	Folder	What's there
✅	A3 Manual Drive Train & Axles	mantrans/	Class done. ASE guide, simple sheet and cram sheet, plus unit and class-final guides.
✅	A2 Automatic Transmissions	autotrans/	Passed. ASE guide, simple sheet and cram sheet, plus unit and final-prep guides.
🚧	A8 Engine Performance	engine-performance/	Official ASE task list mapped and weighted. Waiting on class notes (spring).
🚧	L1 Advanced Engine Performance	l1/	Official guide and Composite Vehicle Type 4 booklet saved, task list weighted. Passing A8 comes first.
⬜	L2, L3	l2/, l3/	Not started.

Printable guides (PDF)

Exam	ASE prep	Class
A3	Study guide · Simple sheet · Cram sheet	Unit 2 · Unit 3 · Class final
A2	Study guide · Simple sheet · Cram sheet	Unit 1 · Unit 2 · Final prep

• The study guide is the full read.
• The simple sheet covers the core ideas on a few pages.
• The cram sheet is the last look before the test.

The ASE guides follow the official ASE task list and its weights. The class guides follow what the instructor covered. None of them include practice questions, so use your Motor Age or GM training question banks for those.

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How it's built

Each course folder is laid out the same way:

Folder or file	What it holds
notes/	Raw class notes and photos, kept as written
research.md (A3: a3_research_foundation_*.md)	Official ASE coverage, outside sources and corrections. Each claim is tagged DOCUMENTED, INFERRED or OPEN
study/	Generated guides as Markdown, HTML and letter-size PDF
sources/	Outside references (ASE guides, manufacturer documents)
CONTEXT.md	The folder's current state: dates, what's done, what's next

The process is written up in workflow/ as a reusable skill (ase-study), so another student can use it with their own notes. tools/studybuild.py turns a guide's Markdown into the printable HTML and PDF.

The Python version is the original and has the same controls in a desktop window:

python3 bay-gen/bay_gen.py                     # window (tkinter)
python3 bay-gen/bay_gen.py --cli -n 8          # one batch in the terminal
python3 bay-gen/bay_gen.py --cli --week --sat  # a work week with a Saturday

The vehicle list, engines, concerns and odds are plain Python in bay-gen/fleet.py, concerns.py and bay_gen.py. After editing them, run python3 bay-gen/export_web.py to refresh the website's data. A push to main redeploys the site. bay-gen/README.md explains how each row is built and which warranty terms are used.

gh repo clone flyboy-byte/asep-study ~/projects/asep-study
cd ~/projects/asep-study   # start Claude Code here or in a course folder

The ase-study skill loads from .claude/skills/ase-study, a link to workflow/skills/ase-study. The PDFs are already committed. To make new PDFs that match the existing ones, you need Chrome (for headless printing) and the claude-paper styling reference (~/Downloads/whitepaper-formatter.html, which isn't in the repo).

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Layout

asep-study/
├── mantrans/            A3 Manual Drive Train & Axles
├── autotrans/           A2 Automatic Transmissions
├── engine-performance/  A8 Engine Performance
├── l1/                  L1 Advanced Engine Performance
├── l2/  l3/             placeholders
├── bay-gen/             bay generator (Python + web/ for the site)
├── tools/               studybuild.py: Markdown → HTML + PDF
└── workflow/            the reusable process and ase-study skill

Not affiliated with GM or ASE. Vehicle and engine names belong to their owners.