In modern cars, you may or may not be able to check the automatic transmission fluid, but most still allow you to check the manual transmission fluid. In the old days autos had a dipstick and manual trannys didn't. If you want the privilege of rowing through your own gears, you'll have to work a … Continue reading Tech Tip Tuesday: Checking Manual Transmission Fluid
Brakes are among the most common repairs for professional shops and DIYers alike for good reason; every car has brakes and they're one of the most important systems on the vehicle. If you live in an area where the long arm of the law hasn't yet instituted a mandatory vehicle emission/safety inspection you can live … Continue reading Tech Tip Tuesday: Diagnosing Brake Pad Noise
First thing's first - what's an orifice tube? An orifice tube is a device placed in a high side line of a mobile A/C system that creates a calibrated restriction, dividing the high side from the low side. As you can see from the picture below, it also acts as a filter to catch any … Continue reading Tech Tip Tuesday: Replace your orifice tube with an A/C repair
Sometimes it's hard to get your hands where they need to be to start a bolt by hand, but if you put the bolt in a socket it falls out before you can reach the hole. What to do? Tape it! You can use a little bit of electrical or duct tape to hold the … Continue reading Tech Tip Tuesday: How to Keep a Bolt From Falling Out of a Socket
Back in the day of cast iron heads and engine blocks, stripped bolts were not a super common concern. Now with all aluminum engines in an all-out quest for weight reduction, we're seeing more and more stripped and broken head bolts. A couple of common occurrences that I've seen recently come from a 2.4 Toyota engine … Continue reading Broken/Stripped Bolts
Back in the day, you took your car in every 20-30,000 miles to have her “tuned up.” That meant Goober at the local filling station changed your oil and filter, air filter, fuel filter, spark plugs and wires, distributor cap and rotor button, replaced/adjusted/filed your ignition points, and maybe replaced the condenser. That was considered … Continue reading Tech Tip Tuesday: What is a “Tune Up”?
Have you ever been doing a disc brake job and you just couldn't get the new pads to fit in the bracket right? Perhaps you even read through my front disc brake walkthrough or my rear disc brake caliper service posts looking for a clue and didn't find anything. Sometimes when new brake pads are manufactured a … Continue reading Tech Tip Tuesday: Making Brake Pads Fit
This may seem like an odd topic to cover during this time of year when most of you are experiencing mild to warm weather, but warming up your car isn't just for the chilly months. If you're like most people, you may let your car warm up when it's cold outside to clear the windshield … Continue reading Tech Tip Tuesday: Should you let your car warm up?
Ok, so it's not really a magic, instant step stool, but it's close. By airing down the tires of a vehicle, particularly a truck or SUV, you can lower the front or rear of the vehicle by several inches which may be just enough to get to whatever you're doing. You can let the air out … Continue reading Tech Tip Tuesday: Instant Step Stool!
Rust. It's a mechanic's worst nightmare. Rust eats through body panels and frames, corrodes bolt heads beyond recognition, seizes bolts and parts together so they can only be removed with a torch, and eats away steel brake, fuel, and transmission lines like there's no tomorrow. If you're wrenching in the north, you're no doubt intimately familiar … Continue reading Tech Tip Tuesday: Bending Brake Lines
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