Author: Import Service

As long as electronics have been around and as long as they will exist, someone will always try to economize on circuit materials. When too much current is applied for the circuit materials to handle, the electronics overheat. Heat is the skulking menace of electronics. If all the heat could be dissipated effectively, most electronic […]

Part Four of the “Front Counter Mechanics” Business Software series (Import Service, November 2000) described how to retrieve certain facts and figures from shop management pro-grams, then import the data into a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet. This month’s article describes how to import data that Excel doesn’t recognize. Previous articles described how to use Microsoft WordPad […]

Curing the Camry’s intermittent ailment was hard enough, but psychoanalyzing the anxious owner had to come first. Autopsychology: The Art It looked very sharp for a nine-year-old car. The still shiny ’91 Camry came in running fine, on its own with no obvious problems – no misses, no smoke, nothing scraping, banging, flapping, clanking or […]

The recent SAE Future Transportation Technology Conference in Costa Mesa, California, provided information on hybrid electric vehicles, 42-volt electrical systems, alternate fuel and fuel cell technology, Intelligent Data Bus (IDB) and OBD-II+ systems. All of these technologies will (perhaps) find their way into new vehicles in the not-too distant future. However, I believe the Intelligent […]

When you are the world’s greatest automotive detective, you meet all kinds of guys. Well, guys like Dave. That’s Dave as in “Dave’s Transmission City,” formerly “Dave’s Lifetime Brake & Muffler,” still earlier “Dave’s International Auto Repair,” “Dave’s Dependable Towing,” “Dave’s Quality Detailing” and so on back through a long chain of sequentially failed automotive […]

No-starts? Piece of cake. Except when they’re not. Here are some that weren’t, and how they were fixed by a very special hot-wire: the iATN. To a ‘civilian,’ a no-start seems like the most frustrating and difficult of all car problems. It’s always unexpected and inconvenient. And entirely inexplicable! After all, ‘didn’t the engine start […]

Part Three of our Business Software series (Import Service, October 2000) described how to export data from shop management pro-grams with built-in export utilities. This month’s column describes how to retrieve data when your shop management program lacks an export utility, as well as how to import data into Microsoft Excel and Microsoft Access. When […]

Egad! These Yank blighters expect their vehicles to run for hundreds of miles without the slightest attention to the fitments from a properly skilled garageman! Bloody truculent colonials! Where is the adventure of motoring these days, I ask you? The Parthenon, Buckminster Fuller intoned, splendid an edifice as it is, dominating the Acropolis at Athens, […]