Off-Road Prius?

Posted on November 9, 2015 by Dan

This is the time of year when people get snow tires put on their car, sometimes on a second set of plain steel wheels. A lot of times this looks to me as if they have off-road tires, because of the aggressive snow tread.

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Suspension Carnage

Posted on November 5, 2015 by Dan

Our collision center is right next door, so we do all the mechanical repairs to the cars they do bodywork on. A lot of times this means we get to see some nicely destroyed parts.

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Time For a New Truck

Posted on November 2, 2015 by Dan

The repair order said something along the lines of “customer states frame is broken”. As it was being pulled into the bay I looked underneath and saw that, yes, the frame is broken.

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Old Engines

Posted on October 29, 2015 by Dan

While I was in school, an older friend invited me to her husband’s engine shop. It was pretty cool seeing the shop, all the specialized equipment, and the engines they were working on.

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Just Making It Work

Posted on October 26, 2015 by Dan

Many times when working on cars we encounter bolts in really awkward locations, that make it a pain to work on. The Toyota 4Runner has a bolt buried behind the alternator that took me an hour to get out. Hyundai brakes have bolts in the worst places, preventing using power tools and making a brake job take twice as long as it needs to. The bolts need to come out, so we just make it work.

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Broken Timing Belt

Posted on October 22, 2015 by Dan

The timing belt is one of the most important parts of an engine. It makes the camshafts turn in time with the crankshaft, so without it an engine wouldn’t run. Some engines are what’s known as an interference engine, which means that when the valves open they take up space that the piston will take up when it’s at the top of its stroke, and this means that if the timing belt breaks, your engine is going to run into itself and destroy itself.

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Flat Tires

Posted on October 15, 2015 by Dan

A flat tire isn’t a fun thing to get when you’re driving, but sometimes it can be a pain for the mechanic fixing your tire. Most flat tires I’ve seen are just a puncture and usually we can just plug it. Sometimes it’s not in a part of the tire we can fix so the whole tire needs replacing.

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Subaru Oil Filter

Posted on October 12, 2015 by Dan

There are a lot of times that a mechanic has to wonder what the engineers that designed the car were thinking. Bolts barely accessible with any wrench, parts in odd places, etc.

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Water Damage

Posted on October 8, 2015 by Dan

We had a very heavy rainstorm a couple months ago. I had parked in a low part of the parking lot, and I was very glad I had waterproof boots when I went out at the end of the day.

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Don’t Stack Wheel Weights

Posted on October 5, 2015 by Dan

I was doing a tire rotation on a Sienna minivan, and when I was all done and pulling out of the shop to park it, I heard a ticking noise. It’s always a bad feeling when there’s a new sound after you’ve worked on a car. I took it back into the shop and quickly determined which wheel the sound was coming from.

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