Posts

Do you mind if I smoke?

You're stopped at a light. The car in front of you has smoke coming out their tailpipe. Worse: you're looking to buy a used car, and smoke comes out of that tailpipe. Or even worse: smoke starts coming out of your tailpipe. What does it mean? Exhause smoke can be black, blue, or white/gray-ish. It means something is wrong with the engine. Black smoke means that the engine is burning too much oil. It can be simply that the air filter is clogged. Just change the air filter. If you go to change the filter, and it's soaked with oil, then that's a problem. Other causes of Black smoke are faulty fuel injectors, a bad oxygen sensor, or a blocked intake manifold. Blue smoke indicates that the engine is burning too much oil. This can be caused by worn engine componets: bad valve seals, bad piston rings or a bad PCV valve. Blue smoke can also be due to too much oil in the engine. This can be the result of an owner misreading the dip stick and putting too much oil in, or from goin...
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Extended Warrenties

I wanted to talk about extended warranties. In theory, they are a wonderful thing. Celebrities star in commercials making us believe that you just take your car to a shop and all these wonderful things will happen, at no cost to you. In fact, that's far from true. A good friend of mine bought a service contract from some company nobody ever heard of. They gave a long list of places that will honor their "warranty". He paid a couple thousand for it, believing that with his car, he's making a winning deal. His car did break down, but none of the shops on their list ever heard of that company. He was out all that money. When you purchase one of those warranties, if you find an auto shop or dealership willing to work with it, prepare to be without your car for several days, even weeks. The shop will need to communicate with the warranty company, if they even answer the phone.  The warranty company will require a compleat diagnosis before they will authorize a repair. This...
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Choosing Your Repair Shop

Choosing a repair shop can be difficult. Most people say word of mouth is the best advertisment, but unfortunatly that's not really the best. When I first started driving my family used the local Exxon station. The problem there was whenever I would go there for gas, the attendants were super nasty. In New Jersey you can't pump your gas yourself. The attendant has to pump it for you, so you had to deal with them. The mechanic there had in his contract that he gets three cents per gallon for every gallon of gas sold. He finally got angry with me because I stopped buying gas there, so he finally told me to go away. Next we went to a tire store on the local mall property. They cheated me left and right. For one example, I brought my car there because my parking brake stopped working. I left the car and walked about a mile home. Several hours went by and I didn't hear anything. I couldn't call because at the time I had a stutter so bad that I couldn't make phone calls, ...
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Introducing, well, me.

I love cars. Crazy about them. I especially like Jeeps, 4x4s, and classic 4x4s and muscle cars, but for some reason I also like station wagons. When I was young I suscribed to 4 Wheeler and Off-Road magazines. In high school I had a plan that would have provided myself and my family with a more comfortable lifestyle. I would take auto body at the county vocational school, the kind of program where I would have gone to high school in the morning and vocational school in the afternoon. Then after graduation I would go to the county community College taking a double major of automotive technology and business management. The long-term plan would have been my own auto repair/auto body/ pre-owned sales place. Now that I'm 61, I kick myself every day. I owned a 1979 Chevy Blazer. You know, the REAL Blazers, full-size, squarbody. Not the S-10, or what Chevrolet calls a Blazer today, which is an insult to the real Blazers. Once again, I traded it. Now when I'm not kicking myself about ...
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