Well, it is finally here Volume 40! What I want to do today is recap some of the best shots we have had this year. For those of you that are new to the community, let me explain. Shop Shots is your behind the scenes look at what a mechanic sees. Strange things happen to cars. Plus people do strange things to in their cars. I want everyone to see some of these crazy things. Be sure to read all the way to the bottom. I got something really fun for everyone(hint giveaway 😉 )
This is a picture from a few years back. A customer brought their EOS in for a service, and they said there was mold on the seat belt. When I moved the seat to replace the sea belt this is what a found. A little mushroom set growing under the seat. The EOS had a water leak at some point. That made it damp enough to sprout some mushrooms.
This is a shot of the airbag on a Bently. This is still the most expensive car that I have ever worked on. It belonged to one of the owners of the dealer group that I work for. My general manager was driving it to his wedding.
On the way back from the wedding, the Airbag light came on. My boss asked me if I could check it out. I did my normal diagnostic routine, and found that the fault was for the drivers airbag. I started to take the airbag off and found something familiar. It looked just like a VW Phaeton. Turns out, it is a fancied up Phaeton. Even down to the clock spring, it had the same part number and everything. Crazy right! So I was working on a $125,000 car, owned by the owner of the company, driven by the general manager of ~9 of the ~30 dealers in the company. No pressure right?? WRONG! I was tweaking out. I got everything worked out just fine.
While I love that mushroom picture, this is one of my all time favorites. It also confirms that all mechanics make mistakes no matter how good you are. The best mechanic in our shop was doing an alignment on this Beetle. In my shop, the alignment rack is right at the window where customers can look into the shop.
I don’t know exactly how this happened. From what I can gather, the mechanic was doing the alignment measurements. On our machine we have to move the wheels back and forth. When he turned the wheel it caught the edge of the rack and rolled off.
Of course the customer was standing at the window watching. No one was hurt. We sent the car to the body shop and had it fix for the customer. All in all the customer was cool about it. Everyone was really happy that no one got hurt. It could have been a very serious situation.
This is one of the funniest things that I have seen. A customer brought his car in because his seat back would not adjust. As you can see he rigged up a bungee and pillow system to help him sit up right.
I drove the car into the shop and took a look at the seat. One of the first steps of the diagnostic process is to “verify the concern”. I turned the knob and the seat moved perfectly. I was able to move the seat back all the way forward and back. The car was operating properly.
There is a trick to adjusting the seat back on VWs. You have to lean forward off the seat back, then adjust the seat. The twist style knob is a little tricky to use. VW designed it that way because they say that it is safer.
Win this for finding the missing Shop Shot
I think that video pretty much speaks for itself.
Alright, I promised that I would do something special today. I want to do 2 giveaways. Here is how to play. You can enter both giveaways, but you can’t win both!
- Find the missing Shop Shots
There is a missing volume number in the the series. Go through and find the volume number that I missed. Post the number that you think I missed in the comments. I will pick a random winner from those comments with the correct number. I will ONLY be counting posts here on the blog for this giveaway
Win this for sharing
- Share, tweet, Pin, Instagram
Just like we did last time. Share this post on Facebook, or Tweet the post out. Keeping track of the tweets is easy. The best way to share on Facebook is to share the post I make on Facebook. If you share it from the site(one of the icons below or just with the link) please let me know. I don’t want to leave anyone out. If you Pin it it Pintrest, let me know.If you want to do Instagram, post one of these pictures, and give me a shoutout.
To make sure that everyone has a chance to play, I will end this on Friday at 8pm eastern time. Okay, good luck and share it up!!!
