rev up your engines, today I'm going to show you how you can save thousands of
dollars fixing your car, now I've learned a lot of tricks over the years I'm going
to share quite a few of them, now the first trick has to do with these
expensive headlight assemblies, often as they age the seals go bad
or they get a little rock chips and then water gets inside and it starts
condensing inside, now as they age the plastic gets brittle it's often hard to
figure out where water is coming from and since these things can be really
expensive, in the case of this Porsche these little plastic headlight
assemblies, hey they cost almost $1,100 a piece, so if you can get rid of the
water and keep it from building up, you can save yourself a lot of money there,
and here's trick, a drill, now in this case I have the assembly off the car, but a
lot of times you can get under the car you can drill hole in the bottom of the
assembly without removing it.
sometimes you need a long drill bit.
I got one this long that I use super long for getting
in holes, but once you drill a hole down here in the lowest point, now
there's a hole, any water gets in it's gonna drain out that hole, now this
particular one has halogen headlamps, halogens get relatively hot, which
actually is a good thing if you get water inside, because the heat will
vaporize any water vapor that's left, and it'll just vent out the hole, you don't
have to worry about getting the old stuff out if any more drips in, I have
literally done this to hundreds of my customers cars, especially when they have
an older car the plastic is cracked, your never
gonna be able to figure out where the leak is anyways, so all you gotta do is
drill a hole in the lowest point and any water gets in it's gonna drip out there,
it's not like you're driving a car under water and it's got to be sealed
perfectly, and of course you can do this hole drilling technology any part
of the car if water's building up inside something, just realize you always
want to drill a hole on the bottom on the lowest point, so the water will always
come out then and sure if you go underwater some water
will get in, but hey we're not driving submarines here, now the next trick has to
do with fixing oil leaks on your car, now I know some people are gonna scream, oh snake
oil Scotty you selling snake oil, well you know I thought the same thing, when I
started using this stuff four decades ago, I thought what can stuff in a bottle
do, well it really shocked me, to begin with as you can see it's a clear polymer it
looks just like water, it doesn't have any suspended solids that could clog
things up in whatever system you use it in, when I started testing that stuff out
four decades ago, I thought okay I had a hydraulic jack for lifting up cars it
was leaking fluid all over the place, I poured a couple ounces of that stuff in
with a hydraulic jack oil, I have to say it really shocked me, because the
next day when I use that Jack and jacked it up, instead of a puddle being under
it from hydraulic fluid leaking, there was nothing, I ended up using that jack
for years and it didn't leak anymore and being a polymer can mix of all kinds of
fluids, the best use I find is, let's say you have a rear main engine seal
leak, or a front main transmission leak guess what you have to pull out the
engine to get to the seal, or pull out the transmission to get to either the
back engine seal or the front transmission seal, and then of course is
gigantic money, big money to pull out of an engine or an automatic transmission,
I've used this stuff on hundreds of cars over the years, now sometimes yeah it
won't stop the leak, because if the seal is so shot that pieces have actually
come off, hey no sealer is gonna fix that but it often works cuz many oil
seals they're round and on the inside of that seal there's a spring that holds
the lip onto the shaft, and if the sealer makes that lip more supple the spring
squeezes it in more and it stops leaking now in the olden days, guys used to cheat
when they're selling the car and they do stuff like throw sawdust in an engine to
keep the seal from leaking, or even worse put brake fluid in it, because brake
fluid swells up rubber and it will stop it from leaking but
only for a short period of time, then what happens is, after they swell up
they shrink even further and then they leak even more, in the past I've had
customers buy cars that somebody had done that, and then they changed the oil
and all of the sudden it starts leaking oil like mad, and I say aw somebody must have
put brake fluid in it to swell the seals to sell it to you, and now you're
gonna have to pull the engine out and put new seals in it, the at 205 doesn't work
that way, it's a polymer it rejuvenates the seals it doesn't make them get all
big and swollen, so I've been using this stuff for 40 years and it still
amazes me that somebody could come up with such an idea that would work so
well in most cases, I've used it to fix engine seal leaks, transmission seal
leaks, rear end seal leaks, I've even used in power steering systems, but there you
have to realize something, since it's a polymer there's no solid suspended in it,
it's not gonna clog up your power steering system, but realize power
steering system, hey they have like 1500 psi pressure inside that system on the
high side on the pressurized side, and often nothing is going to seal a leak in
a system that's got 1,500 pounds per square inch pressure trying to squirt it
out, now another thing that can save you thousands on your car repairs is this jb
weld quick, it's a two tube steel epoxy system, and man you can see I've got the
big ones they make a little bitty ones too but I use it all the time so I buy
the big package, it's a simple system you got steel and you got the hardener, you
just squeeze equal amounts on it on a piece of
cardboard, mix it up, and then it's an epoxy that can seal a lot
of stuff with, your probably not gonna believe this next story but it's real, the
biggest job I ever fixed with one of these was a Volvo engine, it was leaking
coolant out of the head, I could see a crack, so I did a two-part process
I used mr. drill again, and each end of the crack I drilled tiny little holes, that's
to keep the crack from spreading, then I mixed up the epoxy, got a putty knife and
I put it in each hole, pushing it into the crack and let it dry, now in this
case you gotta use patience, you might think, Oh Scotty he doesn't seem very
patient, well I'm usually not, but when I used
stuff I have to turn my brain down a little and realize, you got in some
patients, it's called JB weld quick because it's
fast it's fast, it sets in four minutes, but it
fully cures and hardens after four hours and me I've learned, I let it sit for 12
hours before I use the stuff again in the case of the volvo head that was
leaking, I let it sit for 12 hours overnight, and the next day I started it
up and ran it for half an hour drove it around and checked, no coolant was coming
out, and the customer drove that car for years longer never leaked there again, which
really amazed me I didn't think, hey is is this stuff really gonna work on
something like that, but it did so if you use it on things that aren't all that
stressful, like this headlamp assembly on my old celica you can see there's all
a goo there that's holding the headlight together, now when I bought this car
years ago from a customer, this fender was all smashed in because she'd been in
an accident, and it had broken the headlight assembly, well hey I only paid
350 for the car, so I'll be cursed I'm gonna spend more than that on this
Toyota headlight assembly, I just jb weld it together so it bolted on and didn't
wobble anymore and yeah I've got a really sloppy job
but who cares, look the hoods closed now of course you can do a much neater job
than that, but I learned one thing with epoxies, the more the merrier so if you
have a whole bunch and it's really thick it's gonna have more tensile strength, so
if it's something that you don't see when you're driving the car, who cares if
it's kind of blotchy, it's bigger and it's gonna hold together because there's
more epoxy and a stronger bond in that area,
so sometimes messy is better than neat just like my garage behind me, so really
this jb weld I've been using this stuff for years and years and years, just heed
my warning, even though it says quick and it sets in four minutes, wait at least
four hours before you start operating a vehicle, because you'll want the stuff to
set and cure entirely, not just be dry to the touch on the top, so now you know
three ways that you can save thousands of dollars fixing your car, and if it
ever stops raining I can go back to fixing some of my customers cars, so if
you never want to miss another one of my new car repair videos, remember to ring
that Bell!