Crazy Stories#3: Wild stories from the CAR WIZARD's shop!

very interesting well welcome back to the wizards fireplace office or whatever you want to call it we're going to do some crazy stories today you guys always like the crazy stories of things that i've seen over the years and been in mechanic shops and we're also going to talk about something interesting i found in the automobile catechism which is from the 1900s how to work on old cars let's get started [Music] so welcome back guys i've actually read from this book quite a number of videos ago it's called automobile catechism and it was given to evan road in 1912. this would have been how to maintain your car or how to service your car in 1912 this one's talking about the ignition system it says one of the questions is what is a timer for jump spark ignition an answer is a mechanically operated device for closing the primary circuit of a trembler spark coil so the jump spark is produced in the combustion chamber the motor at the proper instant the most general use of a timer is part of the jump spark ignition system in which current is supplied by battery and then it says what is the general form of a timer and the answer is this most usual design is consist of an outer casing insulating material hard rubber or wood with a hollow cylindrical surface in which metallic contact pieces are set i think they're actually meaning a distributor that's basically what they're talking about they call it a timer and it has a wood cover over it there's some really weird words or different terms in here that we don't even hear about anymore the mechanics of the old days they really were in a totally new realm things have got to think about cars run around 20 or 30 years before this book was written so they were kind of figuring it out themselves it's very interesting to read this book but thinking of stories i have some really cool stories i'm going to tell you guys today just things i've experienced over the years of running a shop and what it's like some of the things you stumble across it's like wow this will be a great story someday so let's go ahead and start with the first one one question that mrs wizard asked me the other day is what is one of the weirdest cars you've ever worked on the weirdest scenarios and that one's pretty easy this was before i was actually running a shop i was working in a shop but someone brought us a late 80s chevy caprice and that itself was not so odd but it came in because it was having issues the engine would stall or okay we'll we'll look at it and we'll see what we find we got it in there and we started looking under the hood and inside the interior and we found something really odd and that was it had been rewired through the doors the fuel pump the engine harness everything that was in there was wiring that you would use on the inside of your house it was romex 14 2 wiring it was this stiff stiff stuff that you bend it and it stays in that shape it's solid copper wiring and the boss i was working for at that time called the owner of the car and was like hey we're not sure what's going on here and that the owner of the car said well i actually had a bunch of mice and pack rats get into my car and they chewed the wiring to the point of full destruction all the wiring was just chewed and missing so i had a 200 foot roll of romex 14 2 and i proceeded to go ahead and rewire my car so after the customer described what was going on with this car the owner my boss proposed to him said we're going to have to have you sign a waiver releasing us from liability on this car because of the way it's been wired and everything and the customer says i refuse to do that i'm not interested in signing any waivers i just want you to fix my car and at that point we were just like nah bro we're going to park this car outside you don't want to sign a waiver we're not going to be liable for fires or danger or things that could go wrong with this and after he left he was gone we just looked at each other like who wires their car with house wiring it was just so odd it was totally baffling to us for that whole week we just kept shaking our head really strange so on to the next one one of the really crazy stories as well is when we first bought this building and we moved into it we had some issues with the business that was prior in here before we bought it they had scheduled deliveries that would come every week and we actually got motion detected in one of our security or surveillance system and the guy had parked his long semi truck in our loading dock overnight and i arrived in the morning and the guy was kind of upset he was like i've been waiting i got to get this delivery and it was just like boxes and boxes of items and we're like i didn't order any of this i don't know what you're talking about and finally he showed me the bill of lading and it was products that another company that used to be here would sell and we're like that company's gone it's been gone for a while now they're they're on down the road so i put them in the right direction and you think okay well that's that's done we finally got that handled they probably got their uh their addresses changed around but they didn't this went on for over a year crazyd we sit in the office trucks once or twice a week we're constantly pulling in for deliveries for this company like they're not here i finally contacted the head corporation of this company and sent them an email and said please update your addresses so that this can be solved it's constantly taking time out of our day and it's really making the drivers mad because they're like it says right here this is the address of where this business is it's like no that business has been gone for a long time and it doesn't even help them that our huge sign on the front of the building says omega auto clinic they don't care they just look at the address even after their corporate headquarters got involved it was still another three or four months of shipments that kept coming in and coming in and coming in it doesn't happen anymore now it finally has been solved but it's i just didn't understand why that couldn't be solved in over a year's worth of time but it finally is now and i'm so glad about that so not all these stories are bad or negative we actually had a customer come in that we fixed several of their vehicles and they were really really happy with it and they live in a little bit more wealthy area not too far from the shop and they have pieces of equipment that just don't get used anymore it was actually a trimmer like it's like a weed trim or a weed whacker but it was on wheels and they'd been sitting a long time in the garage and the spouse or the wife of this guy said get that thing out of here and she was like well what do you want me to do throw it in the trash and she said i don't care what you do with it well he took it down here and just says here you guys can have it i think it's like a 400 weed trimmer it's like you guys do good work for us we're really happy with what you being here and helping us out keep our cars going if you can use this you can have it and ever since we use it all the time when it's grass mowing season around all the equipment we have used equipment for sale on the side of the building and it can get in and out of all the pieces of equipment and trim everything up really fast it was totally a game changer it saved a lot of time for us and it was just an unexpected gift just like here cheers take it it's like wow this is awesome at the previous building we were at before this one it was a much smaller building but we still had camera surveillance we had cameras posted on the top of the roof looking out over the lot that we were at and every day at a certain time a bird would fly up to the camera and its face would literally be right there in the camera but it was every day at the same time like 10 15 or 10 16 in the morning like clockwork crazyd would be looking at the cameras at the screen you'd be like up the spy birds back every day and it would look in the camera and it was looking around and it got to be where we expected it and there was one day that came along that we realized we haven't seen spy bird in a long time and he must have passed away or moved on or something but it was it was weird how a bird can become part of your business routine your daily routine oh look there's spy bird he's back so what happened to him i don't know but it was really interesting while it was happening was kind of cool the next one it would be kind of a complaint as as part of doing business you when you invite all customers you get all all kinds of people which is understandable but we had one customer we call mr snoopy we did sell cars at that time i had a dealer's license i had cars out on the lot that was in front of the building i was at but along the building right at the building was customers cars being repaired timing chains timing belt whatever kind of jobs we had going on well one evening i looked on my security system i check it quite frequently make sure everything's good to go and i got an alarm there was movement so i checked it out and this guy he was kind of a difficult customer but he was on the lot but not on the cars for sale one customer had dropped their car off and they put their key in the the key drop so it was secure and safe but they forgot to lock the doors this guy's sitting in the car and trying things and the next morning the guy comes in and he's like well one car out there oh it's got i opened the glove box and he started listing things in there that were really personal items there were really none of his business there wouldn't be any of my business i don't go through my customers stuff i got onto them i really laid into them pretty hard i was like our cars that are for sale out there are out there why are you in my repair customers cars he goes i'm not in looking to buy cars i just thought i'd start looking at them and start checking them it's like so you're telling me you're going to my customers cars outside just going through their stuff well yeah i said not anymore you're not i got the police involved i said you come out here again it's trespassing i'm going to have you arrested for messing with stuff and we never did hear from him again but it was like who does that it's just really weird that was one of the benefits and actually one of the driving factors of me buying such a large building that i have now is that my customers cars can be inside out of the weather locked up so mr snoopy can't get to them anymore so i really enjoy this big building so the next one is called neighborhood surveillance and i guess in this day and time it can happen to any business that has cameras surveillance systems but i kind of know the the local sheriff kind of know him a little bit and he has my number so i got a call from the sheriff he was like can we meet you at your shop right away and overlook your security system and check the the footage on it this possible runaway situation okay so me and mrs wizard came down here and opened up the shop late in the evening and turned on the system let him go through it and they were watching and watching they went through minutes and minutes and minutes of footage over the past hours and hours and they finally stopped and they found it and there was this what was he like a 12 year old boy he just went walking by the business so once they saw that in the footage they were able to notice which direction he went and based on the footage they looked at in our business they were able to find him and bring him back home and have a happy ending to the story it was just kind of weird that we didn't put those cameras there for that but i'm glad that we could help help out a runway find his way back home so that was kind of interesting what we've had several times is not just one occurrence but we have boxes and boxes be delivered to the shop every day during the week because we order lots of parts but one day i ordered a an o-ring that's all it was it's a little o-ring you know in a plastic sleeve but i got this huge box really huge and i opened it up and there's all kinds of the the air bubbles or the stuffing there's all in there and i i dug around and i found nothing i just about threw it away and i found just stuck to one of the little bubbles was the o-ring i needed i was like oh my goodness i could have thrown apart that o-ring away and that was a special size o-ring that i had to special order i could have thrown in the trash it's like why can't they send in an envelope why does the box is literally big enough that you could put a small television in it i just was like wow i better be more careful when i get these boxes when i think that there's nothing in there and really there could be a small tiny little thing in there i don't know why they use such large boxes so obviously the guy boxing us up really didn't care he was like yeah it looks good ship it out so you know whatever i just have to be more careful with that the next one i'll call insurance fraud there really wasn't any fraud that went on but it was really kind of odd i just purchased this shop and i had a good level of coverage but i started to have more and more exotic cars parked in here over the days or the weeks and i was getting kind of antsy it was like what if a tornado comes or a fire or something happens i may not have enough coverage i better up it so i called my insurance agent up at the time i think i had fifty thousand dollars coverage or something and i said i'm going to need 500 000 in coverage for my garage keepers policy and he laughed nobody has that kind of coverage he says car wizard most of the shops i have insured through us have thirty thousand forty he says yours is a little higher fifty thousand dollars coverage i said i tell you what why don't you just come down to my shop and i'll show you around okay so he did and the first thing he did when he walked out into the large area of the shop is his jaw hit the floor i said that's a mclaren mp412c i said yeah that's a lamborghini murchilago yeah that's a ferrari 360. yeah that's a maserati quattroporte yeah so i looked at my insurance agent and i said yes i'm aware of what they are but really think about this for a minute close your eyes i said a tornado just came and destroyed every one of these cars i said fifty thousand dollars won't even pay for one of them i said i'm going to start limiting the amount that i have in the shop at a time have two or three of cars like this but i'm still going to need the 500 000 coverage and he looked right at me he was like this is this is a rarity this is i've never dealt with this before he says i may have to get underwriters involved he finally called me back the next day and he was like i was able to get you that coverage but that is the max if you want to get any more you're going to have to have underwriters and a whole bunch of different things involved but he was like i i thought you he said car wizard i literally thought you were pulling my leg i thought you were full of it but apparently not so and of course my policy went right way up after that of course where a customer came in but the lady had never been here before she didn't know much about me she'd heard through the grapevine that i existed and i was we have a really good rapport here we do good work so this is at my old shop so the lady came into the office and pulled me aside and she described her car and asked are you qualified to work on this car want to be sure that you have the knowledge and the skills to be able to carry out the task on this car and i kind of was thinking maybe she owns a rolls royce or something i i explained to her yeah we're qualified we're definitely able to work on your car and be happy to work on your car so she took me out to the front door and showed me her car it it's a 2002 lincoln town car i was like okay yes we're definitely qualified to work on that one so we went back inside and schedule it and everything but really what was odd to me is that the whole time we were talking there's a door to the shop right here that's glass it's all glass you can see right in everything in the shop and right there next to the door was a 2006 lamborghini gallardo and right in front of it was a ferrari it was a ferrari 355 and i'm thinking how how would we not be qualified to work on your lincoln town car when these customers fully trust me to work on their 180 000 combined car i don't i was just blown away by that anyways it was really really weird so the next one and there's also the last one is kind of odd as well and i call this one chop shop like i said in a previous one of the stories i gave i kind of know the sheriff some of the local law enforcement here and i had one come by one day one of the detectives that works for the sheriff's department he said i just wanted you to know something car wizard and i said what's that he says first of all can i take a tour of your shop okay so he did he walked around he's a car wizard fan he goes wow this place is cool he says but that's not why i'm here why i'm here is because we haven't gotten one or two calls but we've gotten over 10 calls from the public that live in the local area that are concerned that you're running a chop shop the kind of cars that are coming and going out of the shop it's has to be a chop shop you're cutting them up and selling the pieces you're taking these lamborghinis you're taking those ferraris and cutting them down to the frame he says i know better i'm a car wizard fan i know about hoovey's garage i know that you're fixing these cars i know that they're going and these are valid customers and you have a valid business here he said i just wanted to tell you that it's so weird he said i actually had one guy argue with me he's like no no that's a chop shop you've got to get in there and make an arrest no sir we're not going to arrest the car wizard if you want to watch his videos you can and you can see that there's no chopping going on in that shop it's so i guess the the local community here they just never seen cars like that and when they come into the area it really freaks them out and the last thing the detective told me before he left one person a lady actually called and said okay i get it it's not a chop shop but i don't want to see those cars in my city they piss me off and the detective's like ma'am he's not breaking any laws i don't care i don't want to see those cars they piss me off well sorry man you're gonna have to keep seeing him because he's not breaking any laws and the lady hung up but wow that's weird it's just those are things that happen in a business that you don't expect you would never think that that would even happen but it definitely has here at omega so thanks for following along i know you guys like the stories that i have in the shop in the previous videos i've done they do really well because you guys like to hear what is it like what are the things you run into in the business and those are some of the things that you run into if you're curious what kind of tools i use in the shop check my amazon affiliates link in the description below and if you haven't hit the subscribe button already i really recommend you do that now because we got many more cool projects going on in the shop thanks for watching [Music]

Channel: Car Wizard

Views: 296,093

Keywords: car wizard, david long, hoovies garage, tyler hoover, car issues with tyler hoover, omega auto clinic, scotty kilmer, car repair, car maintenance, tavarish, Doug DeMuro, samcrac, vinwiki, Hoovie, mechanic, Car issues, BendPak, Car trek, stories, crazy stories

Id: otRxMPkPjjQ

Length: 21min 26sec (1286 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 17 2020