Automobile repair shop shortcuts

If a motor car repairman could go through more than one thousand of the best garages and repair shops in the United States and collect the good ideas he saw in them, he would have a wonderful fund of information on which to draw in solving the problems that come up from day to day. Realizing that few mechanics or garagemen have that opportunity, however, Motor World employed a corps of trained investigators to obtain that very information. In their tour of the country these experts visited more than one thousand garages, repair shops and service stations and collected several thousand time and labor saving kinks, methods and devices which the various shops they visited have found exceptionally helpful in making engine clutch, gear set, running gear and body repairs, in managing and equipping these shops, etc. Fifteen hundred of these were picked out after a careful study of the entire lot and these are given in the following pages. Mere gimcracks and novelties that have no practical value have been omitted. The idea throughout has been to give helpful suggestions that will shorten the time in which a job can be done, or show a better way to do it.

While the book unquestionably makes interesting reading for an evening by the fire, it is really intended for constant reference at the shop and we recommend that you keep it there. Its contents have been collected at considerable expense and with the sole thought in mind of helping the good mechanic become a better one. Progress comes largely from experience. And here is the experience of fifteen hundred experts who found that the particular method they explained was a better way to do some job or helped them shorten the time required to do it. A glance at the special index given in the front of the book will enable you to locate any item at once.

These methods were first published in Motor World as "The Repair Shop Short Cut Department." Garagemen and repairmen immediately realized its great value and the Department proved a phenomenal success from the very first. In fact, it was so popular that the issues of the paper were soon exhausted and the demand for them was so insistent that it was finally decided to publish all of the data in book form. That was done, but the edition was quickly exhausted. A second and then a third edition was printed, but these were also rapidly exhausted.

This is the fourth revised and enlarged edition. It contains all of the short cuts which appeared in previous editions, as well as some six hundred additional kinks which have subsequently appeared in Motor World.

The publishers will be glad to receive criticisms or suggestions from interested readers. If you have a method of doing some particular repair which you think is better than any shown in this book, let us know about it.