Rocklin and Sacramento Auto Repair

When you notice one of your headlights has gone out, it’s important for the safe operation of your vehicle to get it changed and working again.  Not only is replacing a headlight important for your ability to see in the dark, but it’s also vital that it be lighting your way and aimed correctly so oncoming drivers aren’t blinded.   Changing a headlight used to be something a driver might try to do themselves.  But that was back when headlights were standard sizes and fairly easy to access on your vehicle.  That has all changed with new technology and designs in today’s vehicles.  Most lamps are now LEDs, and there are different sizes, intensities, and shapes in different vehicles. Accessing those bulbs has also grown extremely difficult in some cases, and we recommend you have one of our professional technicians do it for you. It's just as important that your brake lights and side marker lights work, too, as they contribute to the safe op ... read more

It’s likely happened to you once or twice.  You head to your vehicle, open the door, turn the key and… lo and behold, your battery is dead. Now you’re stranded, may have to get a jump or a tow, and you’ll definitely be late for wherever you were headed. While your vehicle may sometimes give you warning signs, other times it doesn’t.   As many as one out of every four vehicles will have to have its battery replaced in the next 12 months.  If you don’t want to be surprised the next time your battery fails, consider having it tested. There are different types of battery testing.  One measures voltage. Another checks for something called conductance.  By sending a certain type of electric current into the battery, it can measure how healthy your vehicle’s battery is.  There’s also a load test.  It checks how your battery is working while drawing power from it.  Newer test equipment found in professiona ... read more

If your vehicle has an internal combustion engine, it depends on two things to make propulsion power for you to be able to motor on down the road: fuel and air.  The engine mixes the two in just the right proportion so that they can be ignited, creating a series of tiny explosions that are coordinated in such a way that your vehicle moves steadily ahead. One of the key parts to making sure that mixture of air and fuel is correct is a little tube that measures the amount of air that’s coming into the engine.  It’s called a Mass Air Flow sensor, or MAF sensor.  There are two wires in this tube, one of which is heated up with electricity and the other isn’t.  When the air flows over the heated wire, it cools.  When the temperature of the two sensing wires is different, the MAF sensor either increases or decreases the current to the heated wire to try to make it the same as the other wire. That’s sent to a small computer that tells the engin ... read more

It’s always more comfortable in your vehicle when you can control temperature and humidity in the cabin. Air conditioning, which is standard on most newer vehicles, is a vital part of that comfort, and a key component of that system is the condenser. The condenser converts the refrigerant gas into a liquid by cooling it down.  There are a few reasons the condenser can fail.  It can start leaking, which is usually caused by faulty seals and tubes, or debris from the road can damage it since it sits in a vulnerable spot at the front of your vehicle.   Another way your condenser can be damaged is when bits of metal are released after your vehicle’s air conditioning compressor fails and are sent into the condenser. In both cases, you will have to have the condenser replaced as well as other components that are part of the system. Here are signs that your condenser needs replacing.  When you turn on your air conditioning, it won’t make the air as cold a ... read more