Dura-Bond: Rounding Out a Niche
Dura-Bond says the full-round, all “USA-made” Babbitt bushings it manufactures are designed for today’s transmissions and provide the tightest tolerances in the industry.
‘It’s a Small Shop, but We Do a Lot of Work’
The fact that Kevin Sanborn Sr.’s shop received a Better Business Bureau Iowa 2015 Integrity Award is really all you need to know about him — although there is more.
An Expanding Presence
Transmission Digest recently visited the BorgWarner Powertrain Distribution Center in Melrose Park, Ill. A lot has changed since the last visit in 2015 including the new location. The new distribution center is near major transportation hubs including airports and interstates making it cost effective and convenient to bring in BorgWarner products from around the world. The Powertrain Distribution Center manages a supply of components from more than 10 BorgWarner facilities around the world and ships product to more than 100 customers in 17 countries.
American Transmission, Jacksonville, Fla.
While the company is invested in systems and sales on a large scale, the managers preach customers service for all patrons, near and far, individual and commercial.
Working Technology
“We’re so proud,” says Dennis Erickson Jr., Vice President of the company his father founded, Superior Transmission Parts, Inc.® “We are a well-known industry brand name, and we are what we’ve always been, a family-owned leading-technology company that delivers parts of extreme high quality that are designed, tested and manufactured here in the USA.”
Load and Launch
Mike “Hipster” Hohnstein, one of the creators of the transbrake valve body, built a distinguished performance-oriented business, and with two partners he recruited along the way, they have been drawing on their drag-racing expertise to lure daily drivers who like having racing experts working on their transmissions.
Fleeting Car Counts?
The arrival of a new year brings with it an ownership and management need to evaluate how well a shop has been performing and to determine via forward-gazing what would make the shop more efficient and/or effective in providing services at a profit. In years past Transmission Digest has chronicled the changing focus of transmission shops that, in a post-350 world exchanged a specialization in domestic automatics and manuals to one more focused on automatics only, albeit automatics wearing both domestic and international name plates.
Not Bragging, Just Super-Blessed
Vehicles Unlimited is a business by the Schudy family, for the Schudy family, and the unrelated employees are also considered family. When Pat speaks of his young staff, he is speaking of “my boys.”
Standing Behind It
Notwithstanding the complex inner workings of the units repaired every day by retail repair shops, there’s likely nothing more complex for a shop owner to understand than profiting from the warranty offered on transmissions and other powertrain rebuilds. If you have a Ph.D. in statistical analysis, you may be slightly ahead of the rest of us, but this is one of those areas where the science melds with the arts of experience and knowledge.
The Only Thing You Have in Life
Chippy Transmission Service in Morgantown, W.Va., was founded by a man named Gay Chipps who was called Chippy. His son’s nickname was Chipper, but after a while, he was called Chippy too.
Supporting an Industry
With a single and brief sabbatical, ATSG (Automatic Transmission Service Group) has been the engine behind Transmission Digest’s technical content for more than 30 years. Among other duties, the ATSG team of support technicians and technical instructors prepare articles in Transmission Digest Tech/Talk bulletin as well as Technically Speaking and Shift Pointers articles that appear in the magazine and its companion digital publication.
Transtar: Reforming Relationships
Transtar, the aftermarket’s largest distributor of transmission and related parts, was recently re-acquired by a group led by its founder, Monte Ahuja. The Transtar management team contains faces familiar to the industry who tell Transmission Digest that the company’s philosophy will return to what made it successful: Building relationships. Ahuja says that an evolving and increasingly complex industry creates new and different customer needs that are calling for what he calls “game changing” innovations.
