Goss’ Garage

Pat Goss, MotorWeek's resident master technician, helps consumers understand car problems and how to speak the same language as their technician. As cars becoming increasingly complex, fewer repairs can be accomplished at home. Effective communication with a repair shop is vital to keeping consumer and operating costs under control. From rattles and squeaks to leaks and drips, Pat covers a myriad of issues designed to keep cars on the road and out of the repair shop.

Spring Car Checkup

With spring comes potholes, and potholes can do a lot of damage to a car. So one of the things that you want to do, is you want to make sure that you get your car up in the air and you have a look underneath it, to make sure that that last “mother of all potholes” you hit, didn’t do some serious damage that may be concealed. Now the most typical thing that gets… Read More

Smelly Air Conditioning

Sometimes people absolutely amaze me. See, if they sat down at the breakfast table and were presented with something like two stale, moldy, decrepit looking English muffins, well they would be horrified. They wouldn't to be in the same room with these things. Yet, at the same time, they'll go out on a hot, humid day, start up their car, turn on the air… Read More

Engine &Throttle Bottle Cleaning

You may think that when you burn gasoline, that it cleans your engine. But in reality, it may not. It actually dirties the inside of your engine. Now, there are a lot of spots inside of an engine that get gummed-up with carbon and various other things that are the result of burning fuels and vapors from the crank case. The tops of pistons, the backs of intake… Read More

Engine Cooling Basics

So, you’re a do-it-yourselfer and you try to take good care of the cooling system on your car. Well, it’s really easy today to make some mistakes in doing that. First, always make sure that the coolant that you buy for your car matches the requirements in your owner’s manual. See, one size may fit your car, may fit most cars, but one size usually doesn’t fit all… Read More

3M Clean Sand

There are lots of jobs around the house, and around the car that require sanding. And that is mostly a really messy operation. But Jen Cook from 3M has a solution for us. Jen, welcome to Goss’ Garage. JEN COOK: Thank you for having me today, Pat. PAT GOSS: Alright, now, you’ve got some body filler here. And that’s got to be the worst in the world when it comes to… Read More

Boroscope

Under the hood of a modern car is very crowded these days. It makes it difficult to see a lot of things. You know, in reality, fixing a car is relatively easy, but figuring out what to fix—well that is the dilemma. So, here's a tool that comes from Snap-On Tools that can help save a ton of diagnostic labor. It's a boroscope. Now it has the ability to record video… Read More

Road Force Balancing

You know tires have changed over the years. So have cars. And one of the more common problems that we find with automobiles in general has to do with tires. You see, tires change from being a tall tire, that’s the way they used to be. The distance from the rim up to the curve of the tread used to be quite a distance and it was relatively flexible. Today, tires… Read More

Flood Damaged Cars

With all this crazy weather that we’ve been having there are tons of flood damaged cars on the market. And to give us some pointers we have Chris Basso from Carfax. Welcome to the show, Chris. CHRIS BASSO: Thanks, Pat. PAT GOSS: Alright, how many flood damaged cars do you know of at this point? CHRIS BASSO: There’s over 200,000 flood cars that are on the road… Read More

Anti-Freeze

Open the hood on your car, take a look underneath that hood, and you'll see something that is really compact. Lots of stuff in a small space. And you'll notice that there's a lot of sophistication in there. Well what that essentially means is that there's nothing cheap to repair under the hood of a car anymore. And that means you have to look at your preventive… Read More

Timing Belt Kits

Throughout most of automotive history, vehicle manufactures elected to build their engines with metal timing chains to control the valves and camshafts in their engines. But then 30, 40 years ago somebody came up with a brilliant idea to use a rubber belt. They found out over time that had some limitations and now virtually every manufacturer is back to using a… Read More