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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
July’s Front Counter Mechanics discussed the Microsoft Office suite of products. The article was published not because we at Import Service own lots of Microsoft stock (Don’t we wish!), but because Office has become the standard of business information exchange. So, what exactly is ‘business information exchange?’ The way this article comes to you is […]
Some of the earliest cars had an odd, pivoting stalk on the steering column, right where most cars have the turn signal/headlight switch now. A few others had one on the dash. Serrations along a quadrant held the position you chose. It’s a long-gone control – the spark advance lever, used to manually change the […]
Planned obsolescence was once a fact of life in dealer showrooms. Last year’s models automatically looked outdated and tired, just as soon as the new models and the new advertising were released. Those who bought into the ‘newer is better’ sales pitch replaced their cars every two or three years. This was probably a good […]
