Almost every vehicle on the road has a longer wiper blade on the driver side. On older vehicles, you’ll also see two of the same size wipers working together. But can you think of any models that have the longer wiper blade on the passenger side?
Description Air filters are an easy service item to overlook, but most manufacturers recommend a new filter every year or 15,000 miles. Protect your customers from dirty air entering the cabin (and the stink of a filthy filter element) by checking cabin air filters on...
When you saw the image at the top of this article, you probably knew what you were looking at. If you hang panels all day, you said, “A body shim!” If your life is spent undercar, you said, “An alignment shim!” You might also think they're for antiques. But shims have...
This article is a quick reminder to buy (and use!) a surge protector on your (or your shop’s) scan tool(s). The modern vehicle scanner has WiFi, a screen, and touch input. It is, for all intents and purposes, a computer, and it doesn’t like “dirty” power. Protect it...
Description If you're an experienced technician, you may feel as though you've seen, heard, and repaired just about everything. But don't let your wealth of knowledge and experience prevent you from learning more to stay up to date with today's complex...
I’ve mentioned the easy business you can score by offering to perform trailer service for customers that pull. When doing a job not long ago, someone asked me why I was adding lubricant to the dust caps. It’s a fair question. When getting into bearings, I know I’m...
Disclaimer: I purchased this tool at full retail price at my own expense, with no compensation to write about the item. I was watching a video the other day of Eric O. at South Main Auto replacing a manifold on a Pentastar. We have a little experience with that here...
Description Yellowed, hazy headlights aren’t just ugly; they can reduce a headlight’s effectiveness for your customers. Would you rather polish the old lenses, or simply install a Dorman replacement?Related Videos
Dorman makes an item to join wires, the parallel connector, that is both helpful and widely misunderstood. If one reads reviews of these, they’re often rather negative. More than a cursory examination yields the issue, however: these are often purchased mistakenly by...
Rebuilding ratchets, cleaning the welder tips and nozzles, and oiling air tools all fall under the umbrella of things we know we should do, but don’t until a job stops. Dressing chisels and punches, however, is a housekeeping task I’ve found not everyone knows they...
At one point in my automotive career, I ran a rollback wrecker. Those days are getting smaller in my rearview mirror and the game has changed over the years, but I learned a lot of things that I wish someone had just told me. My recovery work is limited to salvage...
As a young mechaniclet, I fought springs often. Specifically, helical tension springs gave me metaphorical headaches and literal skinned knuckles. I encountered them most often when performing brake jobs on vehicles with drum brakes. I went through a ton of tools,...
Three words no shop manager ever wants to hear are customer supplied parts. There are some really good reasons for that, and it’s understandable why many shops take a “just say no” position on the practice. But there are also plenty of perfectly reasonable arguments...
Well, this was a humdinger. Let me explain how I ended up here. I was popping ball joints free from the lower A-arms so I could swing the CV axles out and replace the hub assemblies on this car. The left side freed up with a few taps. This side? Well, this picture is...
The Serviceability Hall Of Shame was born from all the times we’ve looked at a vehicle and realized some usually simple task was going to be nightmarish. It is, ultimately, a response and explanation of the inevitable question, “Good Lord, why?!” Today’s entrant isn’t...