![]() ![]() If it didn’t have oil pressure it wouldn’t run. The gauge isn’t reading.’ I said, ‘Does the engine start and run?’ He says, yeah, and I said, ‘It’s got two oil pumps. my Ford diesel doesn’t have any oil pressure. I have figured out it was a pack rat over the phone. I’ve just fixed hundreds and hundreds of thousands of cars in 45 years. All this doesn’t work if you don’t have great customers that pay their bills.Īre you one of those guys that can tell what’s wrong with a car by the way it sounds? Success doesn’t happen between 8 and 5, but I have a lot of fun out here. ![]() The manuals - parts labor guides - cost $250 each. You’ll be so stupid you can’t change oil anymore. If you don’t do that stuff, you’ll get behind. It costs me $2,500 every year just to update my diagnostic computer. I’ve got a half a million worth of tooling plus the building. For $2,500 you could have everything you need. You could be a plumber with a simple tool set. I subscribe to a couple of magazines and newsletters, and there are schools in Kansas City every spring that keep you fresh. How do you stay current with cars changing all the time? I can scatter the parts on the bench, and I’ll put it all back together. My grandfather, my mom’s dad, at 101 had perfect memory. If you do not have a memory, you will not succeed at it. I came across my kindergarten picture last summer, and there’s about 40 students in the picture from 1959. I remember everything in detail from about four years old and up. You meet somebody different and work on different vehicles. You get to do something different every day - a different challenge. It’s like guns or fishing or any other hobby. If you’re born into it like I am it’s addicting. I remember scraping gaskets on a Minneapolis-Moline tractor when I was 5. My uncle and grandfathers were great mechanics. I went to trade school back in the early ‘70s up at Beloit, but I was basically born into it because being on the farm you do your own mechanical. How did you get into this line of work? What kind of education do you have to have to become a mechanic? King does custom work on collectors’ cars, and he has a few cars collected himself. “This is the king of man caves right here,” he said. The shop has an in-floor lift, an above-ground lift, a heated floor and a jib crane he constructed. ![]() Three years ago he had the expanded shop he works in today constructed. He tried working for a couple of auto dealers in Denver, but didn’t like living in the larger city and returned to rural Salina to build his own shop. He ran a shop at Green Ford Sales in Abilene for two years. He worked for 17 years at Bill’s Truck and Auto of Salina, but even then he was repairing cars on his own time after his 10-hour shifts were over. Joe King has his own fully equipped, three-bay car repair shop that he usually works in seven days a week. YEARS ON THE JOB: 18 years as business owner 45 years as mechanic TITLE: Owner, Joe King Automotive, 636G E. ![]()
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