Outside Insight – Can Restart Your Marketing Brain
If you’re lucky, your thoughts, opinions, and ideas are challenged every day. Regular, open discussion is a healthy thing, especially when it comes to justifying what you’re most passionate about.
But let’s be real. With the various responsibilities you have in your day and how busy work can seem, it’s easy to fall into a consistent, comfortable, unchallenged rut.
DIYs or Bunnies?
With vehicles staying on the roads longer than ever before, we’re seeing more age-related issues with our customers’ cars. With age comes the increasing probability for human intervention in the form of aftermarket alarms, stereos and exterior lighting. A recent multi-hour, hide-and-seek experience with a 1992 Acura Vigor simply underscored this fact.
Playing with Transmissions
Tech-support hotlines have been burning up for years with phone calls concerning rapid gear-train failure in GM TH400 transmissions after routine rebuild or repair. It’s time to address the issues that cause this and reverse widespread confusion surrounding gear-train setup on this and similar units. Today we will clear up the mystery in setting proper endplay for this transmission. If tolerances are not set correctly, costly comebacks can result.
Understanding these basic checks on the 400 will give you back-ground knowledge in setting build procedures that will be used with similar gear sets, such as 4L80-E.
Hyundai/Kia 6-Speed Automatic Transmissions: Part 1
Although Hyundai was not the first manufacturer to offer a six-speed automatic transmission, they ultimately made up for lost time. In 2009 the car company released a series of six-speed transmissions to accommodate a wide range of Hyundai and Kia applications. The transmissions can be FWD or AWD and are rather compact in design. There are three basic levels or sizes that can overlap vehicle models and engine displacements.
Tremec Brings Us the TR3160 6-speed
I am sure everyone in our industry is familiar with Tremec, one of the world’s largest and technically advanced manual transmission manufacturers. For years Tremec manufactured 3- and 4-speed transmissions for Ford, including RUG, RAT, SROD, RUG, TOD, etc. Tremec acquired the manual transmission division of BorgWarner and then produced the T5, T45, 3650, T56, TKO, and the TR6060. Manual transmissions have been on a steady decline on vehicles manufactured in this country for years and are now confined mainly to sport or performance models.
As a Tech, You Must Detect
Occasionally you will have a vehicle come into your shop that takes you down a different path than what you might have expected. The following account tells the story of one of the times that it happened to me. The star of this show is a 2006 Chevrolet Silverado 2500 4×4, equipped with a Duramax diesel engine and an Allison 1000 transmission.
Bill Paying and Reputation
Paying bills is one of the most difficult things we have to do in business for a number of reasons. One that always bothered me was that the money I worked so hard to get didn’t even have a chance to get all warm and comfortable in my checking account before I had to take it out to pay bills. The old “hard-come, easy-go” scenario. It was almost like the money was never really there. Time is another factor. The time it takes to pay bills pulls you away from money-making activities, and we all know that’s where we should be placing most of our energy. Of course some of us have bookkeepers to help with the bill paying, but often we need to get involved anyway to determine who needs to get paid now, who can wait longer, and how much we can pay each creditor.
December 2015 Issue
In This Issue
Toyota Tacoma Rear Differential Issue
Transmission Solenoid Progression
