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.

Grounding Problems

On today’s cars and trucks, a little piece of wire like this and a screw can cause monumental electrical and electronics problems. You see, modern cars have all sorts of computers so that means they have to have absolutely clean good electrical connections. Now everybody’s familiar with checking the positive side of things to make sure that the power is getting… Read More

Getting Hitched

Watch a couple hours of commercial TV and you're bound to see an ad for a pickup truck towing something that’s roughly equivalent to the empire state building. And from that, you assume that any variant of that pickup truck well, it can do the same thing when in reality it cannot. You see, those are very special trucks that are built specifically for towing heavy… Read More

Vital Fluids

Now whether your car is new, it’s old, or some place inbetween, it has vital fluids. And the most important of those vital fluids is the engine oil. Now, you can have a newer car that may have an oil-like monitoring system on it, but remember that most of those monitoring systems do not tell you the condition of the oil. All they do is make a guess based on the… Read More

TSBs

You’ve probably heard it said that it’s a changing world. And that is certainly true when it comes to automobiles. Now, in the past I have told you for emergencies and so on you should always have a fully charged cell phone in the car. But now we have something else that you should be using your cell phone for. That is to record vital information about your car.… Read More

Let the Sun Shine In

Sunroofs are becoming so popular they're are almost standard equipment these days. But, contrary to what you might think you have to do some maintenance on them. Now, that maintenance consists of lubricating anything that moves like this wind deflector here moves up and down. Well it moves on pivot points and every pivot point is a possible wear spot. So you use… Read More

CARantine Tips

During the pandemic, many of us have cars that are sitting for long periods of time. And that can lead to a lot of problems; things like dead batteries and low tire pressure and all sorts of different things. Now how can you prevent a lot of these? Well, number one is going to be the battery. See, modern cars are loaded with electronics. And those electronics… Read More

Trailer Maintenance

What could be simpler than a trailer? There really isn’t much to them. And if you don’t maintain them well what's the worst that could go wrong? Well here’s something. This one- it was parked over grass for long periods of time and the axle actually rusted from the inside out from the moisture. And going down the road it broke and the wheel came off. So always… Read More

Throwing Shade

For many of when we get a new car, we want to customize it to make it our own. And one popular way of doing that is to tint the glass in the car. And to give us some pointers we have Stephen Leacock from tint world of Owings Mills, Maryland. Stephen, welcome to Goss’ garage. Stephen Leacock: Thank you for having us. Goss: Ok, what are some of the things that… Read More

Pane in the Glass

What could possibly be easier than cleaning the windows in your car? Well maybe a lot of things. First you have to make sure that you use the right products. Use a glass cleaner that’s designed for automobiles not for household use. The reason is some of the household products they can leave a film on the windshield that causes the wipers to streak and smear.… Read More

Valve Cover Gaskets

One of the most common places for an oil leak on an engine is and always has been the valve cover up on the top of the engine. Back in the day the valve covers used to be made out of tin and they were kinda fragile. These tin valve covers used flat gaskets made out of cork or sometimes rubber. Well, that evolved into aluminum valve covers which were machine flat… Read More