Auto Repair Boss: Fill & Download for Free

I had a 77 Camaro and one day I could not get the car to shift into drive. It was like the tranny was frozen. The car had a floor shifter in the middle of the seats. Anyway after checking everything I could think of out, I figured it was the transmission and it would be at least three or four hundred to get it fixed. My boss (I was working at a foreign car repair shop) told me to disconnect the linkage under the car and see what happened. I did so and found I could move the transmission into gear easily by hand. It turns out the cable from the shifter to the tranny was fused solid because of a bad ground. So I replaced the cable for about fourteen dollars and all was fine. Funny enough, my buddy had a Grand Prix with a floor shifter. When he tried to enter a highway, his battery shifted and ground out the side terminals to his radiator and his cable fused. He called me for help. He told me what happened, I told him to relax, that he didn’t have a transmission problem. When I fixed his car by replacing the cable, he couldn’t believe it. He asked me how I knew. A shop had told him he needed a new transmission. I explained and he was my biggest fan for about a week lol

Once upon a time, there was an auto repair shop. They had about six bays and a good average turnaround rate. They were doing pretty well. One day when the new manager was walking around, however, he noticed something shocking.There was a guy... reading a magazine! He wasn’t working on a car or helping customers. He was just sitting behind a counter, eating up profits with his hourly rate.He knew full well who this guy was. This was the “parts guy”. When the mechanics needed a part—an oil filter, a water pump, brake pads, etc.—they’d go to the parts counter and request it. The parts guy would retrieve it from the shelves and give it to them. If the part didn’t work out, they’d give it back to him and ask for a different one. If they didn’t have the requisite part, he’d order it. He’d also order commonly used parts when they started getting low. He kept the parts shelves nice and tidy.But here he was in the middle of the work day, just sitting there! How often was he just sitting there? The new manager determined to find out.So, over the course of the next week, the manager tracked how much time the parts guy “worked” and how much time he just spent sitting around, chomping away at profits. He determined that 80% of the time, the parts guy did no work! He just sat there, reading a magazine or other material. Profitless!So he fired the parts guy and told the mechanics that now they were in charge of getting their own parts. There was some moaning and groaning, but they complied. What else could they do?Over the next month, the manager noticed a frightening trend. Their average turnaround time went up, way up! A repair that normally took a few hours now took a few days. A simple oil change went from less than an hour to half a day. Hell, even doing a simple tire plug could take half a day! And they were—gasp—losing customers!He determined to find the root of the plummet in productivity.To make a long story short, it was the missing parts guy. When the mechanics got their own parts, they’d grab them off the shelf and try them in their repair. If they didn’t work out or they grabbed too many, they’d just put them back any which way. They didn’t always put them back in the right place, or in the right box.So that made it harder for them to even find the stuff they needed. Nothing was in order anymore. Plus, no one ever ordered anything, so they were always out of what they needed; they’d order it when they needed it, instead of beforehand. Then they had to wait for parts delivery to get them the stuff they needed, which could take half a day.So, instead of eating away at profits, the guy who only “worked” 20% of his time allowed the rest of the staff to be more productive. His absence actually killed profits by a wide margin. He was hired back.And they lived happily ever after.

I had a ’67 VW Squareback and I stopped at a local auto repair shop and asked them if they worked on VWs and they said no so I left…A friend and I had a shop where we serviced, repaired and restored old cars. My ex-wife called me one day and said she had a friend with an old car that was running poorly, had been to several repair shops with no success. She wanted to know if I could look at her friend’s car and I told her to have her friend bring it out to the shop.The next day the lady came out to the shop driving a nice, original condition, low mileage ’63 Plymouth Valiant two door hardtop. It was smoking from the tail pipe and running roughly and the engine, a slant 6, (the leaning tower of power) was dirty and dripping oil on the ground. Everything under the hood had oil on it.She said she inherited the car recently and loved it, drove it for a while, but when it started running roughly and blowing white smoke from the tailpipe, she took it to three shops to find out what was wrong and get an estimate on repairs.At the first shop the mechanic opened the hood and listened to the engine and said she had a broken crankshaft and needed a new engine. She went to another shop and they said she needed a new engine as hers was shot. At the third shop, the young technician looked all around the car, came in and asked the boss where to plug the diagnostic computer into the car since he couldn’t find the port. She told the young man just to close the hood and step away from her car.I looked the car over, checked a couple of things, took the PCV valve out of the valve cover, shook it next to my ear and heard nothing. I dropped it into a coffee can of cleaning solvent and shook it a bit and watched the clear solvent turn black. I let it soak for a while and after a while fresh solvent stayed clean and the valve rattled when I shook it. I replaced it, started the car and it ran fine.The plugged PCV valve was letting crankcase pressure build up inside the engine blowing oil from every loose gasket causing the external leaks and into the cylinders causing the smoke.I then went over the engine, replacing the dry cracked valve cover gasket, tightening the pan bolts and timing cover bolts. I recommended a complete tune up which she agreed to and cleaned the engine and under-hood area.I had another regular customer.