Grease The Wheels Podcast

Send us Fan Mail On this week’s Grease the Wheels, Uncle Jimmy reimagines some popular games to be more on brand with technicians and people who fix things for a living. There’s probably a good 2/3rds of you reading this right now who are playing “Trash Jenga” (we want to see who has the tallest!) but what other games are out there? From the classics: “Battleship”, “Operation” and “Monopoly” we ge...

Send us Fan Mail On this week’s Grease the Wheels we get into some of the things that the “people of the chair” don't see about your average technician working in the automotive industry today. Doctors have a hard job, but typically people don’t evolve as fast as automobiles- otherwise we should really have bluetooth by now! We also take a deep dive into the way that technicians are paid and...

Send us Fan Mail On this week's episode of Grease the Wheels, we get into some of the laws and legal things to keep in mind when it comes to our occupation, and we don’t even get to OSHA! Uncle Jimmy finds some of the laws and guidelines for the State of Texas when it comes to auto repair from a consumer's perspective. The too long didn’t read for this entire episode is, “get everything...

Send us Fan Mail On this week’s Grease the Wheels we get out of self-reflective introspective mode and go straight for the jugular: asking the pointed question “who are you?” to everyone else in the building!  We know what we are there for, but a lot of these other bit part players can have nebulous or extremely vague job duties which lead them to have a variety of motivations (or lack thereof). O...

Send us Fan Mail In this week’s episode of Grease the Wheels, we get introspective with asking ourselves some questions when it comes to our own happiness. Yea, we’re wading into the murky waters of mental health! We found a site called “Positive Psychology” for self reflective questions to ask yourself, and decided it was perfect fodder for a podcast. When you look in the mirror what do you see?...

Send us Fan Mail On this weeks episode of Grease the Wheels, we detail the amazing journey of being an automotive technician in true Uncle Jimmy fashion. From being a mechanically adept or interested youngster with a POS car, to making the leap into tech school and eventually becoming a skilled journeyman, to eventually exiting the industry either on a gurney or through a rage quit - there is only...

Send us Fan Mail On this week’s Grease the Wheels, we talk about the massive technician shortage and some of the brilliant fixed ops plans to fix it. We talk at length about an article we found on LinkedIn where they address all but one of the major causes for why shops are having problems keeping technicians. The one they missed though pretty much invalidates the rest of the article, but there ar...

Send us Fan Mail On this week’s episode of Grease the Wheels, Uncle Jimmy puts on his prophecy hat and talks about some of the things that we can see coming down the pike for the automotive industry. It is not a secret that the automotive industry is very slow to adapt with some things, the fact that they still employ salesmen when we have internet sales pretty sorted out is a testament to that. H...

Send us Fan Mail On this week’s episode of Grease the Wheels, Uncle Jimmy falls asleep on the couch and wakes up at 4AM to record a podcast. Most technicians are a straight up bargain. From the amount of things that we have to know to what the shops that employ us charge, we know that there is a real disconnect between the rate at which we receive raises to the rate at which our jobs get more diff...

Send us Fan Mail On this week’s Grease the Wheels, we see how many times Uncle Jimmy can say the phrase, “don’t be a dick!” This is another one of those infamous, extra-spicy, “weekday night” episodes compounded with the fact that he is fresh off vacation. So When Uncle Jimmy gets back to the shop and it is a s***show, he goes off a bit and threatens corporal punishment for people who leave wheel...

Send us Fan Mail On this week's Grease the Wheels we talk about the new guys that are attempting to put a dent in the 650,000 mechanic and technician job vacancies nationwide. We all have a million “new guy stories”, and let’s be clear we want to hear every single one of them! Obviously they are not set to replace us right now, but given time and space to develop some of these new guys are go...

Send us Fan Mail On this week’s episode of Grease the Wheels we give you some of the right tools for, well, greasing the wheels! Right now people are looking for jobs in tons of different industries, but in our case the tables are tilted a bit more in our favor because of the technician shortage. No employer is going to advertise the things about their shop that sucks, so it is up to you to find i...

Send us Fan Mail On this week’s completely off-the-rails episode of Grease the Wheels, Uncle Jimmy gives a literal voice to some of the tools and equipment in your shop. What would happen if tools could talk? What if your wheel balancer, alignment machine, and tire machine could scream at you with the voice of your good old Uncle Jimmy when they’re being operated improperly? Odds are that it would...

Send us Fan Mail On this week’s episode of Grease the Wheels, we are talking about a bunch of things that Uncle Jimmy can’t explain about the automotive industry. We go in depth into things that we can’t explain as technicians in regards to some of the higher up’s not having a good grasp on what is going on in their own shops and the industry in general.  We also go into some of the bigger questio...

Send us Fan Mail On this week’s episode of Grease the Wheels we talk about indies, mobile techs, and “rogue techs” who are working out of their home garages. Because we work in a dealership, this podcast often revolves around working for a dealership as a mechanic, but there are many modern alternatives that have been gaining traction as the business has evolved. Indy shops are truly a mixed bag:...

Send us Fan Mail On this week's Memorial Day episode of Grease the Wheels, we talk about the generations in regard to the conflicts they fought and the cars they had to fix. Fittingly omitting “The Lost Generation”, we examine the incredibly simple nature of early mass produced automobiles when they were being driven by “The Greatest Generation”. This is the generation who honed their skills...

Send us Fan Mail On this week’s episode of Grease the Wheels we are exploring a favorite topic of ours and giving some real world potential fixes for the problem. The problem for this week’s episode is the technician shortage, with new facts and figures indicating that the industry could have up to half a million unfilled job openings in the not-so-distant future of 2024. Again, these suits with b...

Send us Fan Mail On this week’s episode of Grease the Wheels, we talk about the bus! The bus we are referring to in this case is the metaphysical bus of the blame game, often between irate customers and uncaring management. We’ve all been hit with it in our careers as mechanics or just people who fix things for a living, and more often than not it is undeserved. When auto repairs do not go as plan...

Send us Fan Mail On this week’s episode of Grease the Wheels, we apply the arc of the extremely popular show “Bar Rescue” to the automotive sector. Folks, this one would get ugly in a hurry. First off, there are a lot of people in management in the automotive sector that think everything is absolutely fine despite their businesses actively falling apart due to either neglect, poor decision making,...

Send us Fan Mail On this week’s Grease the Wheels, we talk about those people and places that you don’t talk about anymore, because they’re on the blacklist! The blacklist when we are talking about the automotive industry also includes the “do not hire” list, and there are a lot of ways to get on someone’s blacklist. Almost every shop has some form of a blacklist, whether it be related to customer...

Send us Fan Mail On this week’s Grease the Wheels we take a break from our sustained assault of the senses and take aim at another plague of the world today: passive aggressive attitudes. In the automotive industry being passive aggressive is about as common as breathing with some people. However, in a departure from form we actually give you ways to be more passive aggressive! The opportunities a...

Send us Fan Mail On this week’s episode of Grease the Wheels we talk about the sense of touch! We also go into depth on having “the touch” and how to develop your own personal “touch” when working on cars. With the amount of components on modern cars that can’t be readily seen or accessed, having a good sense of touch is extremely important. “The Touch” is almost metaphysical, culminating in perfe...

Send us Fan Mail On this week’s episode of Grease the Wheels we are talking about the sense of smell. There are a lot of smells that cars make and have in general. Right off the bat, the olfactory system is one of the major triggers for memory, so when you smell something and it makes you think of a very specific moment in time that isn't a coincidence. We also talk about some of the smells t...

Send us Fan Mail O n this week’s episode of Grease the Wheels we talk about the incredible amount of things that we as mechanics can tell about a car by the way it sounds. There are a ton of issues on cars, boats, machines, whatever you work on- where the first sign of trouble is going to be something not quite sounding right. Yet, somehow our customers (and producer) will ignore these sounds to t...

Send us Fan Mail On this week’s episode of Grease the Wheels we talk about some of the things we have seen as mechanics. From the way that customers treat their cars like rolling dumpster fires to some of the terrible previous “repairs” we have seen literally everything. When it comes to the senses, we can tell a lot about a car by the way it looks. As technicians we have seen cars broken in every...