What’s the only edged instrument that gets sharper with use? The same one that solves every problem you’re ever going to solve. Here are a few ways to keep yours honed keen. The car finally rolls out the door and down the road, days late. Ate your lunch? Ha! It was one of those killers […]
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When we talk about CV joint service, it’s usually just a matter of deciding when to replace a cracked boot or a noisy joint. Customers rarely spot a CV joint problem for them-selves, unless they drive until a damaged joint fails completely and disables the vehicle. That’s why it’s important to inspect the CV joints […]
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Part Two of our “Front Counter Mechanics” series on Business Software (September 2000) described how to create a customer mailing list using Microsoft Excel. If you have built an Excel spreadsheet, you know that project is comparatively easy; the real work comes in filling in the data. If your repair business is like most others, […]
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Who are those guys with the lab coats and clipboards to tell us how to do our work? What do they know? Let’s just ignore ‘em and hammer out some cars. Then what? Don’t they drive ya nuts? ‘Do it this way.’ ‘Do it that way.’ And never in any way that makes the work […]
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Vince does some super-sleuthing to decipher the hidden meaning behind diagnostic trouble codes. We all used ‘secret codes’ when we were kids. If you wanted to get into my boyhood clubhouse, you had to know the secret code. It didn’t matter who you were — even my father wasn’t excepted. Fortunately, Dad was very understanding […]
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Some timing belt jobs are tricky, but on the Mitsu DOHC V6, you can get into serious, destructive trouble just while you’re removing the old belt! One of the most troublesome timing belt replacements is on the Mitsubishi double-overhead-cam V6 engines. There’s not much difference, except for fewer parts, on the Mitsu inline fours, but […]
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Do you remember when the UHV band was added to the television broadcast spectrum? As the old manual TV tuner in our photo illustrates, the new band brought roughly a seven-fold increase in the number of potential broadcast stations (up from the original 12). Later, as cable and then satellite TV gained a foothold in […]
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Unfamiliar shouldn’t mean impossible. Here’s how to check a Mazda rotary engine for basic mechanical integrity. An engine most of us have always found interesting, but (if you’re like me) haven’t worked on enough to know as well as our interest would incline is the Wankel rotary used on Mazdas, mostly in recent years their […]
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Cars with the acceleration of a gasoline engine and the fuel economy of a hybrid, all with an almost classic oil-hammer engine. What’s the drama? (Hint: You already know most of the cast!) The subtle control circuits are too bad, in a way, because the traditional, non-electronic Diesel engine was so simple: If you didn’t […]
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After an astonishing 184,000 miles, the original clutch on this one-owner 1987 BMW 325iS finally decided it had completed its tour of duty. The way it failed was curious, though. Instead of the typical symptoms of gradually slipping and losing engagement, the owner said the car developed a decided ‘crunch’ in the clutch pedal, followed […]
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