rev up your engines, today I'm going to tell you things you shouldn't do when you're
fixing your car, now I've been working on cars for the last 50 years, still got my
fingers, my toes down here, ears, eyes and I still have them because I know what
not to do, the first thing you'll notice is, I don't wear any rings
some people said, Oh Scotty's not married he doesn't have a wedding ring, but
they're all wrong, I've been married for 40 years, here's a picture of my wife the
first time I met her, and a few weeks ago one of my customers saw my wife going
into the house when I was working his car and he said, Scotty you certainly out
kicked your coverage, which I simply responded, you have no idea how fast I
used to be, but the reason I'm not wearing any rings is because rings are
metal, they conduct electricity, you can really hurt yourself if you have a ring
and you connect it to electricity in your car accidentally, now car batteries
don't have much power to hurt human flesh, they're 12 volts actually 13.2 but
close enough, and if you have positive and negative hooked up to a battery, you
can stick it on your finger all day long it's not going to conduct electricity, you
put it on one ear, stick it on the other, nothing will happen to you, but with a
metal ring on your car, in this case we're going to use this giant nut, watch
what happens when electricity touches it with positive and negative, as you can
see here, the nut has welded itself to the end of my jumper cables, you don't
want it welding on to your finger, so do not wear rings when you're working on
cars, because even if you move fast and pull your hand back, you might hit
something it hurt your hand, or the ring itself could get jammed in somewhere, and
get stuck, so don't wear rings when you're fixing cars
so I guess Mr. T would make a lousy mechanic, now the next thing you notice
I'm always wearing short sleeved shirts, sure it's hot here in Texas but you
don't want sleeves billowing around, they can get grabbed on something, gets
stuck or if the engines running the fan belts could pull your arm in, so wear
short sleeve shirts when you're working on cars, and if you have really long hair
I don't anymore I'm getting old, but I used to, you don't want to be working
near cars with long hair hanging down, there is a way to get around it of
course, when I was young I had really long hair way down to my back, so my mother just
tied my hair up in a bun and I put a baseball cap on it to keep the hair up
in there, so I didn't have any problems with hair getting stuck on stuff, you don't
want your head pulled into an engine, one time a hippie came in and his VW
Microbus, and he looked at me and he said, oh how long is your hair, I said it's a
lot longer than yours, but in deference to my grandfather, my mother ties on the
bun and I put a baseball cap on, and of course don't have any bling watches on
either, they'll conduct electricity and they can easily get hung up on something
so take all your jewelry off, and of course always have good eye protection
people are always wondering why I'm wearing sunglasses, well one I'm blind as a bat
and if I take these off all I see is a big blur, even at the screen here that's like
three inches for my face, but you don't want things popping into your eyes while
you're working, over the years I've seen a lot of
mechanics they were grinding on something, or they're turning rotors on a lathe
piece of metal comes up, pokes right in their eye, boy they got to go to the eye
doctor, they can get infections, they got to pull those pieces of steel out of
their eyes, glasses are really good, mine are really thick they're safe, but you
can get safety glasses any time if you don't wear glasses, as for me I have a
hard enough time seeing anyways, my eyes are so bad, I certainly don't want them to
be poked to make them even worse, and the terms of long-term safety, my
wife got me these safe grip gloves decades ago, when I was working on a lot
of diesels, she got them because she didn't like me touching her with diesel
greasy hands, it's hard to get diesel grease off, but realize your skin will
absorb all kinds of chemicals, so if you wear these gloves, it keeps the
chemicals off, now a lot of guys they'll wear these gloves and then they'll put
thicker work gloves over the top, like this for an added layer of safety, now
normally I only do this when I got a really dirty job, like cleaning the
sewers out because I don't want to get any of that sewer stuff on my skin and this
will hold the spinner a lot better and the inside will keep out the bacteria from
getting to me, and speaking of absorbing stuff, your lungs really absorb things
especially fumes, so I got this big air fan to blow them away from me when I'm
working, Plus as you can see even though it's 7
o'clock in the morning here in Houston, it's already 90 something degrees, so the
wind will help cool you off, you don't want to be overheated when you're
working on a car, so make sure you've got good ventilation and you're not going to
get hot, I'm a shade tree mechanic myself, so I use trees for that too, as you can
see up here, I've got a decent canopy of trees covering me, so the Sun doesn't
beat down on me too much, so know you know with a little protection like a hat,
gloves, glasses, taking off all you jewelry, wearing short sleeve shirts, you
can work on your own car safely and not make mistakes that I've seen many
mechanics do over the years, so if you never want to miss another one of my new
car repair videos, remember to ring that Bell!