Transmission Repair

Thanks, pal!

I was born and raised in Houston. My ex-wife bitched and moaned how much I was "wasting" on such classes, seminars, etc. Needless to say, that's why she is my ex. My current wife, Lorraine, met on Match.com. Holy cow! She has 2 degrees, one in accounting and another one economics. My ex, needless to say, was a financial idiot. I love to be married to a home-grown LDS gal that knows her numbers! I moved to Utah 34 years ago and I haven't looked back since. Mellow people, low crime, very few crazy drivers. I live in a suburb of Salt Lake City, Draper. Check out these demographics... Demographics | Draper City, UT - Official Website AND, another thing... The state prison is about to move and freeing up over 600 acres for high-tech development. They are naming it "Silicone Slopes." The current prison is right across from me. Too wild IMHO. When I go to sell a job, if they don't have the money, they damned sure have the credit.

I didn't ever start making any real money until I started hiring and/or attending seminars about sales, business, and management. Till then, as Michael Gerber so famously said, I was working IN my business and not ON my business. It took me a while to understand that the technically-only automotive sites are technicians working IN their business. Many members were 1 or 2 man operations. I just flat picked the wrong audience. Oh, well... we all learn something new everyday.

It's comfortable for me, Joe. I was banned from 2 other technical automotive sites for talking too much business. 😞 I found a "home". Thanks for all you do!

That's what Elon Must thought, "Surely some engineer has thought of this before." He did what was said to be impossible. Now he's a billionaire doing the impossible.

I have found so many good posts in this community. I love the fact that is this site categorizes different subject matter. Keep up the good work, Joe! J. Larry Bloodworth /[email protected] / 801-885-2227

A fully self-driving vehicle at that. No input needed! Thank for the post!!! I absolutely love it.

J. Larry Bloodworth /[email protected] /801 (Utah, MST) 885-2227

If you're a "shop manager for a friend of mine" now, I wouldn't consider it as retirement. Just sayin'... I love my non-working retirement! 67 and been retired since I was 60.

A charging idea I came up with on EVs is this: Why not have either a separate inverter ON THE VEHICLE that converts 220V house current (for faster charging, 110V is too slow) to DC current the EV can use? I'm no electrical wizard, but perhaps, just maybe, the inverter the EV already has could possibly used in reverse to charge the battery. I know it will add costs to the vehicle either way, but what do you guys think?

Well... it seems it was "user error". 🙂 Sorry for the confusion. Thanks.

I take back what I said about never saying "No" to a customer. We once in the early 2000s had a very young meth-head come into our shop. How did I know he was a meth-head? It was all but obvious. It was a mid-'90s F-150 with an E4OD and he had wiring problems. Before looking at the truck, the first thing he wanted to know was "How Much" to rewire it like the factory as he fidgeted. I instructed him to pull the truck into the shop and pop the hood, which he did. It looked like a bomb went off in the wiring harness under the hood as did under the dash. Long story made short, it had virtually ever electrical add-on in the book. Electric brakes for a trailer, boom-boom box stereo, remote start, cruise control, and etc. After just a peek at this rat's nest of loose wiring out of the loom, I simply told him "No, you need to take to the dealer to get a factory wiring job." The truck sat on my premises for over 4 months and I eventually had our towing company impound the vehicle. I never heard a word from the guy and assumed he just got locked up in jail somewhere.

OK, I got it. I was on this screen and not the home screen. This is supposed to be 16-point. How does it look on your end?

I set this for 14-point and it still looks the same default size to me. How does it look on your end?

Are you talking about the button that says "Size"?----------------------------^

I know about how to increase the screen size. What I don't like about it is that I have to go back and forth from normal to large, depending if I'm looking at text or not. I'm an old dog and prefer the keystroke combination of Ctrl with a + or - to go up or down in display size. I'm also thinking about the reader more than myself. The larger font size is there, but in my experience, it only works occasionally. Here's a picture of my screen setup before I moved into my current house. It's dual 27" Dell monitors. I still have the same setup with the chair, desk, and printer.

Being in the transmission repair industry for 40 years, transmission failure was the big ticket item for ICE-powered vehicles. With EVs, the new big-ticket item is batteries. My brother owns a Toyota Highlander Hybrid with 250K miles on it. It still has the original batteries and runs strong. It's my belief that the battery pack will last a lot longer than expected. Being an industry of tinkerers, "rebuilt" battery packs will eventually be on the market. Don't forget about the salvage industry supplying battery packs either. I believe a lot of naysayers of battery packs are victims of the "Chicken Little" story.

While gas prices are up considerably, I don't think it's really affecting automotive repair very much. Maintenance, perhaps, but G/R no. MY RANT: What's affecting the automotive repair industry the most is general INFLATION. I created the attached image in Illustrator yesterday for a Facebook post I made on my FB page. I think it puts things into perspective. If gas was the only thing going up, most people wouldn't complain. -HOWEVER- Combine gas prices with severe inflation of groceries, housing (rent), and most everything else, it all seems a bit much. IMHO, I think the reason people complain about gas the most is because we're being lied to by Biden and his administration. Putin isn't the cause of high gas prices. You don't see people complaining about groceries as much as gas because we aren't being lied to about groceries. Two weeks ago in just 2 days, the price of crude dropped from $130/barrel to under $100/barrel. That's a 24% price drop. What did the price of gas do? We'll see. How does our federal government calculate the inflation rate? Seems more like hocus-pocus than reality. The numbers they are putting out is not even close to what sort of increase I'm actually spending. The federal government purports inflation is under 7%. Total unadulterated, 100% uncut bullshit. I wish it were only that amount. Would you agree it's a lot more than 7%? My wife and I are fully retired and on a fixed income but are still able to save $2K/mo. At the rate our country is going, inflation is going to slowly eat into that. Perhaps I shouldn't complain. I know shop owners in their 80s who still work full-time in their shops simply because they can't afford to retire. I read about retirees being forced to make a choice between medicine and food. There's retirees homeless in the streets. We have more people homeless today than in any other time in the history of our country. My wife calculated that if we never made a penny off of our mutual fund investments, at our current level, we could live to 91 before running out of money. Looking at the government aging & death tables, my wife and I are predicted at our ages to live to 85 years old. I predict she will WAY out live me because she has never drank, smoked, or done substances in her life; not once. RANT OVER.

Joe, the font size in my posts isn't working. I'm 67 and wear glasses. I prefer a larger font for easier reading. Is there any way you can make 12-point a default font size? -OR- Make it where if I choose 12-point, it works? Thanks, J. Larry Bloodworth / [email protected] / (801) 885-2227

Like I said earlier, I chose not to use a broker. We are a transmission repair shop with no G/R. I contacted my 3 biggest transmission shop competitors in our market area. The Aamco owner came in and said all I had to sell was 4 walls, a roof, and shop equipment. He never made an offer. The other shop owner had 3 locations and just flat out told me he wasn't interested. The 3rd shop owner was a multi-store owner with 5 locations. He once had 10 locations but was down to 5. From the time I let him know we were selling to getting the cash in my hand was an amazingly short 6 weeks. Lucky me, huh? 🙂 In May of 2015, he signed the paperwork for a 10-year lease. Unlike you, Joe, I didn't do all the due diligence like you did. The guy went broke and was consistently late in rent, sometimes getting 2 and 3 months behind. He skipped out after 5 years, then I sold the real estate. Believe it or not, it was a blessing in disguise. If he was still in the building, my wife and I couldn't have really afforded to fully retire until 2025. 😞

I'm on my 3rd wife and is absolutely the best. We met on Match.com 16 years ago. (1st wife=13 yrs, 2nd wife=17 yrs.) I feel like I was born married 67 years ago. Like your wife, my wife couldn't tell you the difference between a brake pad and a spark plug either. -BUT- She has been an accountant for 30 years and has about 70 clients before her retirement. She has 2 degrees; one in accounting and one in economics. She's super-good with money, financing, and savings. Although that's all fine and good, but her general sense of everyday good judgement is amazingly good and BETTER than mine. Before retiring, she would make some decisions I didn't agree with but turned out to be correct. Yeah, stuff like that is scary, but apparently neither one of us couldn't have picked a better life partner.

They would tax EV owners by how many miles they drive. That's what our Utah state legislature is trying to pass. (BTW, Joe, 12 point didn't work on this post.) My wife drives a '21 Toyota RAV4 Hybrid. We've talked about an EV. I don't know about others, but I wouldn't even consider an EV without having my garage wired for a 220V EV charger. Charging away from home just doesn't fit my lifestyle. I often wonder what are people thinking when they don't have a 220V EV charging station at home? Do they just like to hang out? Speaking of hanging out, Elon Musk seems to be ahead in the game. Here's a cut & paste from YouTube. ==================================================================== Elon Musk is working on adding restaurants to charging stations so you can eat while you charge your Tesla Model 3, Tesla Model S, Tesla Model Y or Tesla Model 2, or Tesla Model X. These Tesla restaurants will be located in a lot of areas near electric car chargers and superchargers. Tesla restaurants are Tesla’s next move and the newest invention. These drive-in Tesla restaurants have big potential as Tesla patented new restaurant patents. It will be very impressive to watch this new Tesla food chain of restaurants build up and reach success as Elon Musk is leading the company. This video is an update on Tesla and Elon Musk where we take a look at the Tesla restaurants because Elon Musk will soon go and test the food from his restaurants while charging his tesla. This video also includes Tesla news and Tesla update. =========================================================== The above was taken from this video:

I upped the font size to 12 point but it doesn't seem to make a difference... yet. Maybe it will change when I post it. Anyway... ======================================================================= This is a good example of how weird transmission diagnosis has become in today's electronically-controlled transmission era. This is a post from a friend, Pat Schulte, in a transmission shop in California on a Nissan Versa... Another Versa JF015E/RE0F11A story. Occasional shift into drive delayed and very harsh. The car had a code for a range sensor, and would mess up on the indicator light when it would bang. Changed the range sensor, no help. One of the guys remembered that we had another Versa doing the same and he had followed the circuit and determined the tail lights were bad, replaced them and fixed the problem. Did the same on this one and it was fixed. HTH A taillight bulb causing a transmission problem. Who would have thought??? ================================================ Well, the larger font size seemed to work after the Cut & Paste above from my FB page. The picture below is in a Smoke Shop in Draper. Ain't it the truth? At least it is in my house.

I think how confidently you can say a matter-of-factly price has a lot more to do with selling the job than the price of the job. No matter how low of a price you quote hesitantly, stuttering, or unconfidently, the higher the chance of the customer saying "No." We're a transmission repair shop where most jobs are big-ticket and by nature are harder to sell for most. Believe it or not, we had a 98% close ratio on major transmission work where our prices were the highest in our market area. That was almost double the close ration of the transmission industry average. We were also #5 in gross sales in the nation for a transmission-only shop. If you're interested exactly how we did that, contact me and let's talk. J. Larry Bloodworth / [email protected] / (801) 885-2227

This is an article out of the March 2022 of GEARS Magazine that I thought was timely. We’re all aware of the current supply chain issues plaguing our industry. Between the lack of raw materials affecting the availability of rubber, paper, and steel products, and problems with containers waiting in limbo at our ports, these issues are likely to continue through Q2 of 2022 and possibly longer. While the current parts shortages have added a new problem that shop owners must deal with, they’ve taken it in stride and are doing whatever’s necessary to keep the jobs moving out the door in a somewhat timely manner. The transmission industry continues to prosper. The techs and shop owners who keep up will survive and flourish. With electric cars on the horizon, it will be interesting to see the continued resilience of this industry.