I’m sure you’re like me. You’ve been in the middle of a job and you say “gee I wish there was this little something that would help me out of a mess.” Well maybe there are some things. Let’s begin with products from HELP.  Here we have a tail-lamp socket assembly that fits general motors pickup trucks and sport utility vehicles. In the past what you would have to do is buy the entire lamp assembly, which is expensive.  This way you only buy the circuit board itself, saves a lot of money.

Here’s something we see all the time in the repair shop: key fobs that break off right where the ring goes through them, what do you do?  Well I’ve seen a lot of jury-rigs but here’s something that makes a permanent and effective fix and it’s real simple, again, from HELP, it’s just a case that snaps around the existing fob and gives you a new connection.

Something else right here, if you looked at this you wouldn’t have a clue what it was, but when you see what it does it makes a lot of sense.  The diffuser in the dash for the air conditioner, lots of times they flop all over the place, they won’t stay in position.  Well, you take this little wedge and you push it in, of course you would push it all the way in, it can’t be seen but it does restore the operation of the diffuser, no more matchbooks or anything like that stuffed into the dash. 

Maybe you have an older car and maybe you want to keep that older car going for a long period of time but it doesn’t have a lot of value and it maybe has a seized up or really noisy air conditioning compressor, can’t really drive it cause the belt slips on it and all kinds of problems like that.  Well, instead of replacing the compressor you may get one of these from HELP, this replaces the compressor, uses the same size pulley in the same position so you can use the original belt, and you don’t have to lay out hundreds of dollars for a replacement compressor, pretty clever.

Now, 5.4 liter Ford V8 engines in pickups and sport utilities, they have a problem.  You go to take the spark plugs out of the engine and…pop! The spark plug breaks off, you’ve got the top of the plug, the threads are down inside the cylinder head. Now presuming that these are the threads and that they’re still down in the cylinder head, what do we do? Snap-On-Tools has the answer, and that is very simple: you take the tap that comes with the tool kit, the tap threads the inside of those remaining portions of the sparkplug.  Now you take this tool, it screws into those threads that you just cut, then you tighten this top down which wedges everything together, you put a wrench right up here on the very tip of it and you turn those broken threads out of the cylinder head, and you’re not spending $3 or $4 or $5,000 for new cylinder heads.  What a savings that is.

 

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