Chesapeake Auto Repair

Gear Up: Transmission Service at West Service Center, Inc. in Chesapeake   The transmission system in your vehicle allows you to change gears. Lower gears are power gears. They get your vehicle moving and get it up hills. Higher gears get the vehicle up to speed and get it rolling faster. If you have a standard transmission, then you have to do the work of shifting gears yourself. But with an automatic transmission, the vehicle shifts gears on its own. It automatically starts out in low gear and automatically shifts to high gears as it gets rolling. Again, it will automatically shift to a lower gear to climb hills or when you need a burst of speed. How does it know when to change gears? Today’s automatic transmissions are computer-controlled. The computer gathers information about what the vehicle is doing, and changes the gears as needed. Automatic transmissions are becoming more sophisticated all the time. More gears, or “speeds” are being added. A ... read more

Odometer Rollback On Your Chesapeake Virginia Auto How do Chesapeake motorists know if an odometer is telling the truth? Well, back in ’86, Congress passed the Truth-in-Mileage Act to protect Virginia consumers against mileage fraud. It says a Virginia seller must certify the mileage reported is the Actual Mileage. To have your odometer checked in Chesapeake Virginia, stop by West Service Center, Inc.: If it isn’t, the seller must say why; like maybe the odometer is past its mechanical limits. Some older odometers only go to 99,999 miles and then start over at 0. Or, the odometer has been tampered with, broken or replaced. If the seller tells you the mileage isn’t accurate, there’s not much chance of putting a good number to it; And there’s the unscrupulous seller who claims the reading is true, but it’s not so. What can Chesapeake car owners do? First, you can go to www.CarFax.com, where for a small fee, they’ll give ... read more

Suffolk Drivers: Is It Time To Replace Your PCV Valve?   Improved fuel economy has two benefits for Chesapeake drivers: less fuel is necessary and fewer emissions are released. Suffolk cars and trucks run cleaner than ever. Chesapeake car owners may not realize that the first federally mandated pollution control device came out almost fifty years ago. Virginia car owners that were around in the early 60’s may remember that the PCV Valve came out on 1964 model cars. PCV stand for Positive Crankcase Ventilation. The crankcase is the lower part of the engine where the crankshaft is housed and where the engine oil lives. The crankshaft is connected to the pistons that power the engine. When fuel is burned in the van engine, it pushes the pistons down and the crankshaft rotates and sends power to the transmission. Some of the explosive gases from combustion squeeze past the pistons and down into ... read more