rev up your engines, today I'm going to show you how you can avoid dealing with bad
mechanics, now being a mechanic myself for the last 50 years, I've met good
mechanics, bad mechanics, scam mechanics, and some mechanics that just had no idea
what they were doing, so today I'm going to show you how you can avoid the bad
mechanics, or the crooked ones who might not be bad mechanics, but they just
charge you way too much money for what they're planning on doing, now when
looking for a mechanic, you got to make sure they have the right tools to work
on your car, but don't be overly impressed by a whole bunch of fancy
tools, because with modern computers very good tools can be very small, it's the
tool itself what it can do and what the mechanic has in his head who knows how
to operate them, and find out who's going to be working on your car, it doesn't do any
good if the owner of the shop actually understands quite a bit about cars, but
then you go and you see there's a young kid who's actually working on your car
and doesn't have any idea what he's doing, over the years I found many good shops
that I known did great work for decades, only to find it now the son or the
grandson has taken over the shop, he's not all that interested in it and they
do pretty shoddy work, eventually they go bankrupt, but in the mean time they do
some pretty bad stuff to people's cars, and when you think about it's kind of
amazing I'm not burnt out anymore after doing it for 50 years, but I like a
challenge and when I see something that's broken
to me it's a big challenge to get it working right again and yes really
good mechanics, hey we can be an odd breed, look at my garage there's stuff all
over the place, I got tools hanging everywhere, but that
doesn't mean anything because I know how to use them and where I've got most of
them hidden away, now there's some really anal mechanics out there, they'll have a
picture of the tool on the wall and each one goes in its neat little place, but hey
from my experience, some of the guys I knew that worked like that, there were
some of the worst mechanics I ever met, they were neatness freaks but they
weren't that good at actually fixing cars, they just like their place to look
neat and clean, and as far as it goes for those certificates that people have
saying they've completed courses, they're okay for some things but really
there's book-learning and then there's real learning, years ago my father hired
a guy and he paid to train him to get all these certificates, he was one of the
worst mechanics we ever had, but he could take tests really well, and if you know
anything about the real world, the test of the real world that you can actually do
something means a lot more than somebody sitting with a pencil and a piece of
paper and circling multiple-choice tests, now here's something to definitely avoid
in a mechanic's shop, if you look around you see a whole bunch of cars, but
they're in various shapes of disrepair, flat tires, inspection sticks are
out of date, you want to avoid them because a lot of times they use those
as eye candy to make it look like, oh they're busy all the time so they must
be good, or they take forever to fix cars and some of them will be there for months or
even years before they get done, now here is some advice that you have to use
with any mechanic, good or bad, never say oh I'm in no hurry take your time,
because a really good mechanic is busy all the time and then he'll just let
your car slide to the side, because you said you're not in a hurry and everyone
else is, and a bad mechanic might just think, I'll just let that one slide
forever, he's in no big hurry, I'll do the next job that comes in first to make
as much money as I can, and when it comes to prices, it pays to shop around and
see what you're actually paying for, a friend of one of my customers called me
up and said, Scotty my friend told me about you, I got my car at the shop and
he's going to charge me 350 bucks to reprogram my computer I think that's
kind of high what do you think, well reprogramming the computer just consists of
erasing the data and putting new data in, the computer does all the work, it usually
takes about an hour or so, so I just said, I'll call up the dealer, so I called up a
dealer and they only wanted a hundred and thirty five dollars to do the same
job, so when the dealer is charging $135 for what somebody else is going to charge
$350, obviously the guy charging you $350, hey he's not very honest, so if you find
a guy like that, put some internet posts out there saying how he was
charging you too much money to warn other people, so if there's warnings about a guy
being a bad mechanic on the internet, you pay heed to that, but on the other hand
if there's really good praises of them, be very leery,
I know a guy down the street, he had his own mechanics when they weren't busy, typing
in great reviews of the shop, how great they were, to sucker people to come in
they just made them all up themselves, now you can't beat word of mouth of
people that you know, I've been working on cars for 50 years, you know much money
I've spent on advertising my garage, nothing not a penny, all word of mouth my
customers are happy, they tell their friends, they tell their friends,
everyone's happy and no money's wasted on advertising, and yes these days it can
be hard to find a good mechanic, but it's hard to find a good doctor, or a good
dentist too, just keep searching and who knows you might get lucky and find a guy
like me around you, so if you never want to miss another one of my new car repair
videos, remember to ring that Bell!