Melea Johnson of AutoNetTV’s Pro Channel talks about how to make a great first impression on customers and prospects. Hey, wasn’t Melea in the top 50 on American Idol?
Automotive Training Institute won Frost & Sullivan’s 2008 Customer Value Leadership Award. This award is given to the automotive training and coaching company that demonstrates excellence in customer service. Congratulations to the team at ATI. www.AutoNetTV.com www.autotraining.net
AutoPro Workshop is a fantastic on-line community dedicated to the Automotive Aftermarket. AutoNetTV's Niki Nielsen shares her thoughts on why you should participate and how the entire industry will benefit.
Sign up for the Four Seasons enewsletter and a chance to win in our sweepstakes.
Bryan Stasch, Director of Client Fulfillment and Instructor for the Automotive Training Institute, gives some solid procedures you can implement to increase your Average Repair Order and increase customer satisfaction. The series of ATI segments featuring Bryan air on AutoNetTV's Pro Channel.
Door Locks - Body Computer - Inputs and Outputs - Reboot - Pretty common on today's vehicles.
Turn signals have been wired this way since marker lamps first appeared in the early seventies, but not one mechanic in 50 can tell you why they work the way they do... This video will clear that up.
The connection between the battery post and the terminal is prone to give trouble anyway, and using the wrong kind of replacement battery terminal can create a bevy of new problems in the form of additional connection points. This is the way I teach my students to replace battery terminals, especially when a replacement cable is too costly to buy and too much trouble to route and replace. These solder-on terminals cost about $8 but the ones I use are brass, not lead, which makes them more environmentally freindly. The manufacturers have gone with stamped metal terminals, but those are failure prone and particularly vulnerable to acid attack. These solder-on terminals are trouble-free if you put 'em on right.
This young fellow was my very first graduate - he works at car lot that sells nice used cars (1-4 years old). He's an ASE Master Tech with 7 years in the field.
This little video is one I shot for my automotive students and it's pretty decent, so I figured I'd share it.
Dealership closings in 2008 and 2009 have created an opportunity for improved business throughout the aftermarket, says John Washbish, executive vice president with the Aftermarket Auto Parts Alliance at the program group's Nashville meeting.
One of my fellow employees at the college where I teach automotive had a power steering noise on her '08 Impala (52,000 miles on the clock). She spoke to a dealership mechanic she knew, and all he could remember off the top of his head was a simple recall that had nothing to do with a power steering noise.
She then visited a local filling station/service center (yes, we still have some of those in small south Alabama towns) and he wanted to replace the power steering pump. Before having that work done, she decided to ask me about it and I did some research to find this procedure published by GM in TSB 08-02-32-004B.
While I was somewhat skeptical of this process, it wouldn't cost a lot of time or money to make it happen, but I substituted a nice new rubber oil filler cap (you know, the ones that were used on older small block Chevies?) for the rubber cork GM recommended. These are available at your local parts store. A barbed brass or plastic fitting, some clear hose, a hole drilled through the rubber cap, and I had a special tool. The power steering was very noisy during the process, but after I was finished, the noise was gone! How the power steering system on these units gets airbound without having been emptied of fluid is a mystery, at least to me - cavitation borne of high heat and intense hydraulic action? Maybe. One way or another, the noise was real, this process fixed it, and she didn't need a pump.
I did this demonstration on a 2001 Pontiac Montana with a noisy power steering system to make the video.
Scrub-A-Dub Dub Noise
The 4WD F-150 belonged to a college employee and it had been to a tire shop several times for a scrubbing noise in the front right. The pads were replaced and the rotors were replaced. The noise was quiet for about four days before it came back in full force. The owner made another trip to the tire shop, where they replaced the rotors again, cleaned and lubricated the caliper slides, etc. The right front was silent for another four days before the noise reappeared. Repeated trips to the tire store produced similar results. Finally, after almost a year of listening to the scrub scrub scrub noise (people standing on the sidewalk would react to the noise by turning their heads to look at the truck), the owner brought the F-150 to my auto mechanics department, where one of my students initially replaced the now-worn out disc pads (the truck does a lot of towing) with ceramic pads and resurfaced the rotors. He carefully etched a non-directional cross hatch on the braking surface and washed the rotors with soap and water to make sure they were completely clean and without microscopic metal particles. This time, the noise stayed gone for two days before it returned. This had gone far enough.
A different student suggested that we remove the front wheels and operate the truck in four wheel drive on the lift to see what was going on. The source of the problem was as plain as the face on your nose. The rotor was exhibiting lateral runout, and I knew a set of rotors wouldn’t make the runout go away. The rotors had been replaced twice and machined once. Mounting a dial indicator and measuring the outer surface of the right front rotor, we found the runout you see on the video. Removing the rotor, we checked the hub for material that would cause the rotor not to run true and found none, but the hub itself showed almost as much runout as the rotor, about 0.010 inch. The new hub cost nearly $200, but it took care of the problem; rotor runout after the repair was less than 0.002, and now the scrubbing noise never returned.
Dial indicators are good… They are our friends, and they don’t cost much.
TIA, the Tire Industry Association, has compiled what is billed as the best TPMS relearn chart on the market. AutoNetTV’s Niki Nielson talks about this great tool for the Pro Channel.
While there are many ramifications coming from Chrysler's bankruptcy filing, Rollie Olson, chairman of Parts Depot, says one positive for the aftermarket will be the increased number of good, quality technicians available to work in independent shops. Olson spoke with the Advanstar Automotive Group while attending the 2009 Global Automotive Aftermarket Symposium (GAAS).
