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, […]
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 […]
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 […]
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, […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]