rev up your engines, today I'm gonna give you some tips for fixing your car
getting it to work correctly and not doing any damage in a long run, now I'll start
with fixing electrical wiring that's in your car when you strip off the
plastic coating, you see they're generally copper inside it's all copper
now the copper connects the electricity and the plastic on the outside insulates
it from touching anything you don't want stray electricity coming out, so it's got
to be sealed as you cut the insulation you can twist it together then you can
get a soldering gun solder the pieces together, but then you got bare metal
sticking out and then you can use stuff like heat shrink wrapping you can slide
it over heat it up and that'll seal it in, but sometimes if you're working in
cramped quarters let's say you've got some wiring where the insulation is come
apart the wire is still solid you don't want to cut it and then slide that on
and then solder it, you can just coat it, but you got coat it with right stuff
this is liquid electrical tape I've been using this stuff for over 50 years and
the reason I'm using that and not this RTV silicone gasket maker stuff is for one
main reason, yeah you can get black silicone and you can glue it on and it'll
cover it up, but this stuff cures it's got acid
in it and of course realize what acid does, acid will eat up some of the
electronics so never use this stuff, it's got
an applicator in there and yes it's goopy messy stuff there's no arguing
that but once you put it on and it dries it seals great, I used this on a mini
headlight assembly hit all these wires going in and the minis made them so cheap
that all the insulation near the ends had worn off, now rather than buy an
expensive mini wiring harness or having to rewire the whole thing cuz it still
worked, I put all the wires apart from each other
tied them with a little bit of string so they were all apart, then I coated them
with this, it sealed it and it'll last quite some time, of course it's a mini
something else is going to break on it, that's great for stuff like say you're
testing an electrical circuit and you poke a hole in the wire
so you can get your meter on there, when you're done put a drop of this over
the hole it'll seal it, it's great stuff you know electrical tape it's gonna unravel
over time it's gonna melt, this stuff is made for sealing electrical stuff, now
the next tip has to do with nuts and bolts and sockets you don't want them
fall out when you're working, I do have to say it over the years
I've lost tons of nuts and bolts sometimes even the sockets cuz they fall
off, well I always get a decent ratchet like this, it's got the release as you
can see here there's a little ball, so when you're sticking on you can't pull
it off, it won't fall off, so we should want to lose your socket, but of course
you can still lose the nuts and bolts, now as nutty as it sounds I used to use
pieces of leaves, you stick the leaf on a nut and then jam it in, my little blue
shop towels they're made out of paper they work even better, you stick it on
then you push it in and you just rip the edge off, and truth be told this actually
works better, and since it's like paper towel the leaf sometimes would get
ripped and fall off this is more flexible it'll hold in so when you're
working you have to worry about losing stuff hey your working down in a dark corner,
the last thing you want is something falling out a little piece of paper
towel stuck in the socket before you put it on, it can work miracles and if you're
working on small bolts you're taking off do the same thing, put it on a socket
before you put the socket on the bolts and when you finally get it out it comes
out, I can think of more times that I get something off and then when I pull off
the ratchet and socket, down went the bolt and if it was some oddball bolt
like a magnesium bolt on a BMW, those things are expensive, you can't really
replace them with anything else but magnesium cuz the way it's designed, so
you don't want to lose those parts if you can save that with a little piece of
paper towel hey why not, now the last tool tip I'm gonna give you has to do
with vise grip pliers, you might say oh what a boring subject that's been
covered before, but I kind of invented this thing I think it's fantastic, vice grip
pliers are simple, you clamp this around whatever you want to tighten you
use this little adjuster beforehand to get it tight, now it's just a little
round thing and I'm not Superman so once it's on I can't really turn this thing
that well, and conversely if you want to make it tighter before you put it on, I'm
often not strong enough to close it anymore, but here is a trick, years ago I bought
the slide hammer kit and inside it was an adapter, what you do is you get your
vise grip pliers and you just unscrew, I stripped out the hole guess what the
adapter goes right in there and takes the place of the old adjuster, so then
you can get the whole thing and you can put it on here just snug and then get a wrench
put it on the end and voila, you can get it as tight as you want, mm-hmm I'm
illustrating this on the strut sometimes the nuts get stuck and they
won't come off, they just keep spinning if you do that, but now this is
tight you can get the nut off, I just decided to take that adapter out of that
kit, screw it in the end and now, guess what these vise grip pliers, it lives on
them I replace the other one with it, if I don't have to squeeze it has hard as I can
and wear out my old hands, just put it on snug and then tighten it with a wrench,
that's fine by me and since this is mechanic Monday I'll
be giving away a case of this liquid electrical tape, to have a chance to win
place a clean non-offensive comment on the youtube comments below and if winner
will be chosen randomly by computer to get a case of electrical liquid tape, so
you can fix things right and not corrode it later from acid being into some other
kind of sealer that you put on, so if you never want to miss another one of my new
car repair videos, remember to ring that Bell