It is very frustrating to find yourself in the middle of a car repair and, having followed all instructions to the letter, discover that you cannot continue due to a small problem that is not mentioned anywhere in the manual. If you only had someone on hand with some hands-on experience, someone who has accomplished this repair successfully in the past, then you could ask them your question and be on your way. But instead, you just sit there, bewildered and scratching your head as to why you can’t go any further.
If this situation sounds familiar, you are also like many people who are overwhelmed by automotive repairs when they rely solely on an automotive manual to help them through the repair process. Too often we are stopped by the simplest of complexes that could have been avoided if only we had someone to ask.
Well, thanks to the miracle of the internet, we’ll never have to stand there scratching our heads again. The Internet is the richest repository of information in the history of man, and it would be wise to use all this wisdom to your advantage. It can be difficult to find the exact information we are looking for at times, so I am going to help you by teaching you a search string to help root out useful information when looking for auto repair information on the net.
One of the best places to find answers to puzzling questions is on forum sites. Discussion forums are great because you will often find that someone else has already experienced your problem and posted a question about it online. And usually there is an answer attached to that question that has been posted by another user. And, in the rare event that you encounter a question that has not yet been answered, you can post your question to the online forum, where it will be considered an open topic for discussion and you are likely to get an answer of no small value. . So how can you find these kinds of discussions on the net?
I always use the following search string when searching forum sites: “year + make + model + (repair or problem) + forum” and this seems to get highly specific results with reliable precision. So let’s say we were looking for how to remove a headlight on a 2004 Jeep Grand Cherokee. I’d go to Google and search “2004 + Jeep + Grand Cherokee + remove headlight + forum” to find this information. Here I could read all sorts of useful information from people who have already done the repair themselves and can probably point out predictable trouble spots that could give me a hard time.
Let’s say I need to search how to remove a radiator from a 2005 Chrysler PT Cruiser. Again, after googling, I would simply search for “2005 + Chrysler + PT Cruiser + remove radiator + forum” and I’ll probably find more than one site that has discussions related to my topic. The Internet is a powerful tool. Make sure to make it one of the tools in your toolbox.