Grease The Wheels Podcast

Send us Fan Mail A simple show of hands will tell that many of us someday wish to own our own shop. This is a very solid and attainable goal for many of us as we move through our careers- because it doesn’t take 30 years in the field to realize that whatever the shop charges is usually several times the labor rate that they are paying you. However, while it can be very lucrative, especially if you...

Send us Fan Mail In an industry such as ours, reputation is almost everything. Your ability and attitude from the first day you roll into a shop determines your reputation, and it really is entirely up to you to foster. The goldilocks zone for your reputation is being a decent human being who can fix cars well. The worst case is being an asshole that can’t fix a sandwich. The grey areas are being...

Send us Fan Mail On this Week’s GTW, we are talking a short run down of some of the simple truths of working in the automotive industry. Just because a problem is simple doesn't mean that it can't be catastrophic. There is never a good time for a breakdown, and customers are going to be annoying about it (unfortunately for them, our cars typically work and we can get home just fine). Als...

Send us Fan Mail On this weeks GTW, we are talking the cheapest customers that you are ever going to get in your shop- the used car guys (and that’s a big statement considering our stance on working on your family’s cars). They are 100% about the profit and do not want to fix ANYTHING which leads to a lot of wire ties, duct tape, cutting rotors and other assorted “temporary fixes”. With a mantra o...

Send us Fan Mail On this week’s GTW, we’re talking some of the hilarious, ignorant, and ill-informed things that customers say and do. From the completely clueless, to the people who are pumped full of internet “knowledge”- customers often say things about their vehicles and do things to their vehicles that are beyond logic. Sometimes they think their car is broken when it’s working perfectly fine...

Send us Fan Mail On this weeks GTW, we’re talking one of the common shop friction points: borrowing tools. Despite some of the astronomical amounts of money we owe our tool dealers, very few of us can say that we have never had to borrow a tool. Because of this there is an almost industry wide mantra of, “ borrow it once, cool. Borrow it twice, go buy one for yourself” However, we have seen some c...

Send us Fan Mail On this week’s GTW, we dish pretty hard on ASE testing. Realistically someone who has never picked up a wrench could study for the test, pass it, and be an ASE certified technician. We think that it is a bit of a scam- they make money on the test, they make money on the practice tests, they make money on the parts test- and what are they proving? Just because you can pass the test...

Send us Fan Mail On this week’s GTW we are talking DIY’ers. It used to be really pretty easy to be a DIY’er but as cars have become significantly more complicated, it has become very hard for the average layperson to work on their car. It has also become really easy for the average person to catastrophically break their car when attempting DIY repairs. Even simple botches can lead to THOUSANDS of...

Send us Fan Mail Episode 32: JunkyardsThis week we talk about the epic automotive roll of the dice that is junkyard parts. First off, junkyard parts are easily one of the best examples of recycling on the planet- if the parts are any good that is. Some stuff is easy to tell if its good or bad, sometimes it takes a leakdown test to figure out if its any good or not. A lot of junkyard parts need inc...

Send us Fan Mail On this week’s GTW: our managers often want us to test drive cars to diagnose them, but if there is a drivability issue doing a test drive is the absolute last thing we want to do. Throwing it up on a lift and taking a look is usually a lot safer. Let’s be real, there is a lot that can go wrong (and it often does) when we drive customers cars. There’s a lot of really good reasons...

Send us Fan Mail On this weeks GTW: we want to hear your worst customer stories- everyone has one and most of them are hilarious given enough time. The customer is most certainly not always right, in fact in our industry, more often than not they are completely wrong. In this episode we are going over all of the ways customers can be the absolute worst. Customers who ignore major problems with the...

Send us Fan Mail On this week’s Grease the Wheels, we talk distractions- there are a million of them (including your favorite automotive podcast) and they are almost all better than working. Some of them are pretty benign like your co-workers, daydreams, and even the cars your working on. Some of them can be a bit more invasive like problems at home and the ever present smartphone. Either way they...

Send us Fan Mail There are a handful of right ways to fix a car, there are a lot of wrong ways to fix a car. But as technicians we know that there are things that happen and get done a certain way that only another technician could understand. Extra nuts and bolts, clips, and all sorts of other things get left off and the car is going to operate exactly as designed. This doesn't necessarily m...

Send us Fan Mail On this week’s GTW we talk about working with the fairer sex, and some of the copious amounts of bullshit they have to put up with in our industry. The automotive industry is tough for women, on top of being tough jobs anyways. Service managers who are women often have a lot of problems with customers, even when they know more about cars than that customer. It’s equally bad for wo...

Send us Fan Mail On this weeks GTW: we talk recalls, an arm of the federal government, and all of the shit that had to be put on cars because the government says so. A lot of the recalls are safety related, and that's good, but when the government tells us what has to be on/in cars that's not so great. We also talk in depth about the awesome times when dealership mechanics became EOD tec...

Send us Fan Mail As a whole, we are bad at taking time off. We work a lot of holidays, we often take vacation payoffs instead of the time off (you know, if we are even offered it). And as a whole, this isn’t always the best idea. For one This job is extremely physically and mentally demanding sometimes, so time off just to heal is a good call. The other major point of contention here is that peopl...

Send us Fan Mail If there is one universal truth about life and working in a repair shop, it is that things are not fair. Often times this is due to different levels of ability, favoritism, or just outstanding debts- but we cant help but see the fact that in a lot of cases a select few are getting all of the gravy. This entire situation gets magnified because of the fact that your manager or dispa...

Send us Fan Mail If technicians were guided by a major deity, there's really not a lot of doubt in our minds that it would be the Norse Trickster god Loki. From constantly spouting off movie quotes and hazing the new guys, to squirreling away extra parts in people’s toolboxes and personal space, the pranks and humor that we use to keep ourselves entertained are literally endless. In today’s G...

Send us Fan Mail In this week’s GTW we take a break from running Service Managers and Advisors into the ground to describe the type that we all would want. Basically what it comes down to is that if we are respected, appreciated, and paid: we’ll do ANYTHING that person asks us to do. Service manager’s should be in the building- not hiding from problems in their bunker while you go over the top. Se...

Send us Fan Mail If you’ve been a technician for more than a few years you have probably thought about not doing it anymore: either through winning the lottery or just getting a better paying job. After all, this is one of the only careers on planet earth that if you ask, “should someone go into this industry?” it gets met with a resounding and often times overwhelming “NO!” We love you guys, but...

Send us Fan Mail Work anxiety is something that most people face, but folks, a car that isn't repaired correctly is one of the least dangerous pieces of machinery on the planet (unlike an airplane that isn't fixed correctly as Uncle Jimmy recounts). Sure, if you don't put a wheel on right it could fly off and if you don't put in a drain plug after an oil change it could blow up...

Send us Fan Mail In this weeks Grease The Wheels: Uncle Jimmy gets nostalgic about how common, relatively cheap and fairly easy it used to be to make cars go faster. Also we talk the politics of when your friends ask you to help them make their cars go faster (short answer: do it, it’s a shitload of fun) even when faced with the certainty of turning piston no.8 into chiclets. Finally, we etch anot...

Send us Fan Mail As technicians we take a lot of unwarranted heat from popular culture and society at large when it comes to ripping people off. In reality, it is about 1% of techs who are scalping people for repairs that they don't need, the rest is just bullshit. However, a lot of this image problem is solved when the part or service we told a customer they needed leaves them stranded on th...

Send us Fan Mail Fixed ops managers like to go on tv and talk about why there is a shortage of techs. They blame everything from shop classes not being taught in school anymore, to millennials and gen z not wanting to get their hands dirty. While they're not totally wrong they are ignoring the big problem- what they are doing to make the workplace harder on us. This week, we talk 100k/year pr...

Send us Fan Mail Dr. Phil would say that, "communication is key to any relationship", but that becomes really true when people are trying to describe what's wrong with their car. Thankfully(heavy sarcasm) people are often less than forthcoming with the details of their problem for fear of admitting fault. Combine this with service writers who aren't listening anyways and its li...