Grease The Wheels Podcast

Send us Fan Mail On this week’s episode of Grease the Wheels, we are talking a little bit of science fiction by specing out our ideal robot toolbox. There is a good shot that this is where we as an are going, so we thought we would throw it out into the universe and see if anyone wanted to build the thing. Give it a shape like R2D2, magnetic bolt trays with voice integration, a jump box, and the v...

Send us Fan Mail On this week’s episode of Grease the Wheels, we are taking a look at the industry-wide scourge of a lot of people talking, but not a lot of people listening or doing. Mechanics are really pretty good at listening to other mechanics on a whole, but when it comes to the potentially vast reserve of experience and practical problem solving experience found in the back of the shop, man...

Send us Fan Mail On this week’s episode of Grease the Wheels, we are taking aim at the idea that “high schools cutting shop class” is the biggest pull factor for why adolescents are avoiding the trades in general and the automotive industry in particular. If this were the truth, why not start informing kids about the trades even younger? With this in mind, Uncle Jimmy creatively co-ops some of the...

Send us Fan Mail On this week’s episode of Grease the Wheels, we have been informed by our good buddy Travis that in a recent episode we said the word “F***!” 58 times. That might seem like a lot, but those are some rookie numbers for Uncle Jimmy- so we gotta pump those numbers up. Firstly, “F***!” is used to describe thousands of situations that we as humans collectively and technicians specifica...

Send us Fan Mail On this week's episode of Grease the Wheels, Uncle Jimmy gives Erik the Producer an aneurysm by sitting down and eating his lunch while recording the podcast in a show of solidarity. That’s right, Uncle Jimmy is now banned by some shops (or at least that's what the data leads us to believe) but more than likely is if he isn't banned in your shop yet this will probab...

Send us Fan Mail On this week’s episode of Grease the Wheels, we are getting back to our roots. This podcast was created to rail against people who do not take what we do seriously, and therefore do not pay us seriously. In this episode we take a look at what Uncle Jimmy has been doing in the grip of “corona-madness” by reading articles about the state of the industry. While guidance counselors ar...

Send us Fan Mail On this week’s episode we are tackling the issue of waiters. Firstly, we suggest talking to the other technicians and foreman in your shop and coming up with a list of jobs that customers really can’t wait for. After that we suggest talking to the service manager and service advisors because this will make everyone’s job easier. However, not all waiters are created equal, as there...

Send us Fan Mail On this week’s Grease the Wheels, we take a look at the state of the industry through the continuing Coronavirus Pandemic. Honestly, we thought it would have blown over by now (more on that later) but it hasn't and we are still working. We feel that the image of the mechanic as an essential worker was slightly sullied by the fact that Uncle Jimmy’s insurance agent was also an...

Send us Fan Mail On this week’s episode of Grease the Wheels we are talking about the most fragile thing in your shop- the motivation of the people working there. We have all had that internal monologue while sitting in our cars either on the way to, or sitting in the parking lot of work, where we genuinely wonder if today is going to be the day where we grease the wheels, load up the toolbox, and...

Send us Fan Mail On this week's episode of Grease the Wheels, we are taking a deep dive into the methods by which most of us get paid: flat rate. First off, someone at the manufacturer's factory does a specific job to a car using hand tools to determine how long that job is going to take, which refers to the “book time” of a job. However, there are often many jobs that we can “make time”...

Send us Fan Mail On this week’s episode of Grease the Wheels, we are doing a case study of the single worst service advisor that Uncle Jimmy has ever had. A bad service advisor won't try to sell the customer on the recommended repairs that a technician finds in a multipoint inspection. A worse service advisor will assume that a customer might not have money based on the way they’re dressed or...

Send us Fan Mail On this week’s Grease the Wheels we wanted to take a minute to thank everyone on planet earth who fixes things. You all are the reason that we keep doing this podcast, but more importantly you are the reason that this world continues to move. We take a look at some of the favorite topics, themes, and mantras of the first hundred episodes as we pop in a new clip and set our sites o...

Send us Fan Mail On this week’s episode we take a crack at the rosetta stone of the trades by translating some of our favorite shop talk terms for non-technicians. Right off the bat, every single shop's internal language is a little bit different based on the people who create that inter shop language. Sometimes that language comes in the form of thinly veiled sarcasm or acronyms, while other...

Send us Fan Mail On this week’s episode of Grease the Wheels we are starting out with a question: do car TV shows give people unrealistic expectations as to what we do for a living? Most of these shows condense an entire frame-off restoration and hundreds of hours of absolutely meticulous body, paint, and fabrication work into a nice and neat 48 minute package. This makes them really pretty cool t...

Send us Fan Mail On this week’s episode of Grease the Wheels, Uncle Jimmy attempts to do an entire episode under the “PG” rating- while maneuvering some of the problems that arise when technicians have to talk to customers. Firstly, when we have to talk to customers we only should ever have to talk about what is wrong with their car and how we are going to fix it, everything else has its own depar...

Send us Fan Mail On this week’s episode of Grease the Wheels, we are going back to the new guys, but specifically in relation to the old guys in the shop. Obviously a lot of us have noticed that the number of new guys coming in the door isn't as high as it used to be at the time when a lot of us entered the industry, and what is the quality of these new to the industry techs? In our experienc...

Send us Fan Mail On this week’s episode we are talking about those times when you just want to go absolutely medieval on customers because they’re being unreasonable. Now we know that any time that your car is broken is the worst time for your car to be broken, but for some people this inconvenience of modern life is just too much. This leads them to do things like say you, the technician, broke t...

Send us Fan Mail On this week’s episode of Grease the Wheels we are talking about one of the main things that costs us money, that we’re not really willing to change: getting along with one another and talking about stuff. We prefer it when shops get along and can talk about stuff because a lot of the time it can streamlining the solving of problems and the maintenance of good morale. But sometime...

Send us Fan Mail On this week's episode of Grease the Wheels we are going deep into the debate between what we actually do for a living; are we technicians or mechanics? This is one of those things that comes down to two things: money and optics. According to Google, the difference lies in how we diagnose problems with cars: if you use a scan tool and then fix the problem, you're a techn...

Send us Fan Mail On this week’s episode of Grease the Wheels we are going over some of the core elements of what made this show popular: beating the snot out of service advisors! As you can probably guess, the revolving door is turning at Uncle Jimmy’s shop for service advisors and that is bringing all sorts of havoc, so buckle in. We go over in detail the job description of a service advisor, the...

Send us Fan Mail On this week’s (extra) episode of Grease the Wheels, Uncle Jimmy sits down with fellow BMW Master tech’s Kirk and Travis with their Nova Scotia Duck Tollers (Miley, Farley, and Shimmer) and about 30 beers. Absolutely nothing is off the table in this shop-talk-heavy episode: including the indy v. dealer debate, the physical and mental toll of the job, and the good, bad, and ugly of...

Send us Fan Mail On this week’s episode we are talking one of the most strange and complicated human emotions out there: nostalgia. Literally translated, it means a longing for something that once was and usually when we’re talking nostalgia we’re talking cars, people, and moments in time. We tend to have nostalgia for things that we are consumed by, and one of these things is work. Almost every s...

Send us Fan Mail On this Week’s Episode of GTW, it's another episode of “The Makes” with Mercedes Benz. We start with the end of WWII (because we botched the first round of the Creation-WWII episode) and going right up to today. We are talking everything that makes Mercedes truly “the best or nothing” from their incredible rise from the ashes of a burned out Stuttgart to the highs of taking a...

Send us Fan Mail On this week’s episode of Grease the Wheels, we are talking used cars. This is a touchy subject for us because we have very concrete opinions on what happens, what should happen, and what is going to happen to that industry in the future. As automotive technicians, you and I should inspect every single car that every single person in this country buys. Preferably before they buy i...

Send us Fan Mail On this week’s episode of Grease the Wheels we reach into the GTW vault and bust out an episode from our treasured past, late 2019. In this episode Uncle Jimmy talks about the great people he has worked with and calls out some of the complete morons. We call out some of our largest listenerships, and some of our segments that don’t even fix cars, they fix stuff that makes cars loo...