Tune-Ups & Preventive Maintenance
Most of what stops a car dying on the side of the road is boring. Spark plugs that are getting old. A belt with cracks in it. A hose that's gone soft. None of it looks urgent until it is, and by then you're not doing a tune-up anymore, you're doing a tow.
The honest version of this service is: we look at what your manufacturer says to do at your mileage, and we do that. Not more. Every car has a maintenance schedule buried in the owner's manual, usually organized around 30,000, 60,000, 90,000 mile marks. Spark plugs at one interval, timing belt at another, coolant flush at another. If you don't have the manual, we can usually look it up by your VIN.
Spark plugs are the most common thing people call about without knowing that's what it is. Symptoms are rough idle, hesitation when you accelerate, worse gas mileage, sometimes a check engine light. Plugs are cheap and the labor is straightforward on most engines. On some engines, particularly ones where the plugs sit way down under the intake, it's more work and takes longer. We'll tell you which kind you have before we quote anything.
Belts and hoses get ignored because they're not doing anything wrong until the day they snap or split. A serpentine belt with cracks across it, or one that's squealing on a cold start, is telling you it's near the end. A hose that's gone spongy or bulging is doing the same thing. Neither is expensive to replace ahead of time. Both are expensive if they fail on the highway and take something else out with them, like an alternator or a water pump.
Filters — air, cabin, fuel — are the cheapest part of this and the easiest to skip. A dirty air filter costs you mileage and power. A cabin filter just makes the inside of the car smell bad and blow weaker air. Neither is a big job.
Where we'll tell you not to spend the money: if the car is older and has other problems stacking up — a transmission that's starting to slip, rust coming through the frame, an engine already using oil — a full tune-up isn't going to fix the car's real problem. We'd rather say that up front than sell you plugs and belts on a car that's on its way out anyway.
We're in Graham, open Saturdays, and Brianna can usually tell you over the phone roughly what your mileage calls for before you drive in. Call (253) 375-7057.