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here are many times that you are on the road and tire damage leaves you disabled. With a few simple tools you can get yourself back on the road safely and get to a repair shop that can review your work.
The first thing you have to understand is that not all tires can be repaired. If you have damage to the sidewall of the tire which is the side of the tire without …
Accidents happen and if they are small you might not want to claim them on your car insurance. You have a few ways that you can deal with these problems. You can clean it up the best you can and maybe buff out any light scratches and live with the results or you can decide to do the work yourself and sometimes save yourself more than a body shop would charge you. I …
The common rule for bare metal is that you do not allow it to be exposed for longer than three hours prior to coating it with a nonporous paint. Unfortunately there are many times when you are working on metal surfaces and need to leave them unpainted for extended periods of time before painting.
Three hours is not a magic number and if humidity levels in your area are high then this time might be …
A friend is attempting their first overall paint job on their old Chevy and is having a little problem with their setup. Although their results are pretty good so far they are getting some dust and garbage in their paint and need some advice to reduce it.
The first thing about painting vehicles outside of a professional paint booth is that you are always going to have a small amount of dust and garbage in …
A number of people have been asking about restoring rusted panels on vehicles lately so I thought I would go over some of the best methods to prepare a severely rusted hood for paint. The unfortunate thing about heavily rusted parts is that the rust its self is reducing the thickness of the remaining metal. This is worse when the rust is on both sides of the panel and at some point a rusted …
A friend contacted us today with a question about his six year old vehicle that has been eating an alternator a year for the past three years. In the times with more complexity being built into automotive electrical systems your car’s alternator is one of the few things that should either work or not work. They normally have a life expectancy of at least 10 years or maybe much more and they are actually …
If you live on a piece of property where you are plowing your own driveway and you get significant snowfall in your area there are some things that you can do to setup your truck for the best experience.
First is the selection of your truck. A lot of people want to buy a beat up used truck that will sit unused for 80% of the year for plowing snow and that is fine but …
A buddy of ours is a professional welder now retired and every once in a while in the conversation is what do you do when you are out on a job and you brake something but you don’t have a welder. Can you put something together with a few car or truck batteries and maybe weld a part good enough to get it back to the shop.
A lot of people do this and maybe …
There has been a variety of conversations by owners and mechanics about the servicing of automatic transmissions that have seen high mileage. Some of these thoughts on service are really not good practice although they may seem to be safeguarding the owner they can lead to problems and should be addressed.
When a vehicle has not seen perfect maintenance over a long period or when a new owner assumes a used vehicle there is a …
A friend contacts us today about their vehicle because they are having problems with their exhaust system. It seems that the tail pipe has rusted so bad that it finally broke free from the muffler. They need to get it repaired and are wondering if it is something that they can do themselves or if they need to take it into a shop.
As you can imagine when a pipe is rusting this bad you …