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Transmission Pan Gasket


Doc Hoy
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Been  while since I posted on the forum. Restaurant is really taking off and time is tight.

Perhaps you recall that I own a 2011 and a 2012 Connect which I use as food trucks and delivery vehicles. I love these little trucks and they are making me a nice amount of money.

Developed a serious problem in the 2012 this week end.

The truck started to shift slow, rev between gears, and fail to disengage first gear when coming to a stop. Checked the transmission fluid and found it was a quart low. Added a quart and the transmission started acting a little better. Went to the truck the following morning and found a huge puddle of ATF under it. Jacked it up and found obvious gaps in the pan gasket. (Wish I had taken photos but alas.....) Bolts were all tight. Had it towed to the mechanic. He swapped out the gasket and transmission is acting perfect.

BTW, in the second photo, the bus on the right is NOT a heavily modified TC.....just in case you were wondering.

2012 TC 4.jpg

Finished bus and truck.jpg

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GBL,

You can quite imagine how relieved I was when I got the truck back in good working order and spending only 250.00. I drive these little trucks hard. I really should take better care of them. But I know (in most cases) when a vehicle is telling me it needs my attention now! A puddle of transmission fluid is a little hard to ignore.

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Ever consider a fleet service company?  They can maintain all your vehicles, because you're too busy to do so yourself.  Where I work at, we use a fleet service company with a fleet fuel card.  Or simply make one of your employees in charge of the vehicles: keeping logs on maintenance, doing pre trip and post trip inspections, and yes, keeping the vehicles clean.  It is a big deal to have clean vehicles.  You, being in food service, cannot afford to show up to a catering event in a dirty van.  Who would want to eat soup from a guy who can't even keep his van clean?  How clean is your kitchen?  I was the fleet guy at work for a brief moment.  Until my boss figured out how much it was costing him to pay me overtime when I came in on Saturdays to wash all the cars.  Yeah, okay.  Since I had the liberty of writing my own schedule to come in on a day off, I sort of abused that just a little bit to bill for 10 hours of overtime every week, just to wash cars.  

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Not certain why it failed. My only thought is that the transmission got hot when the fluid level was low. Maybe warping the pan or just weakening the gasket. I have no evidence this is the case but it just doesn't seem normal for the gasket to gap as it appears to have done. No damage to the pan as though one of my employees had run over something. New gasket went in fine.

If I had more trucks I would think about fleet maints. For now, it is too small of a management effort to let it sap away resources. In addition I would not want ANOTHER person calling me telling me that the world would come to an end if I didn't allow them to "maintain my web page" or "deliver paper supplies", or "manage my marketing efforts" or "provide for my employee's retirement". I get numerous calls every day from such harpies. They always come at the busiest times. They arrive in a "Trojan horse" such as, "Gee, This is the best She Crab soup I ever ate. Why don't you let me put your ad in my mailbox stuffer? Just 336 dollars for a quarter page." One "expert" wanted to charge me between four and five thousand to put an ad randomly on the back of the register tape from a local supermarket. Raise your hand if you have ever even turned the register tape over let alone actually read what is on the back of it. 

 

Okay, I am off the soapbox. Sorry guys.

 

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Entirely possible the gasket was damaged as you say.

 

The She crab soup is what got us started. We had been sort of searching different restaurants for a She Crab that we liked. We couldn't find one so we decided to retire from academia and open a restaurant.

She crab is funny. There are several aspect which I have come to accept. 1. Almost no one makes authentic she crab soup. It would be too expensive. 2. Some like to doctor it with sherry and my thought is that if it takes sherry, why bother? Dump some Jack Daniels in a tumbler, hold a can of lump crab meat in your left hand and the Jack in your right. Take a sip of Jack while looking at the crab meat and voila! She  Crab. 3. Almost all she crab soups are good. But none we found were memorable. Ours is not memorable either but it is good and people seem to like it.

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On 9/1/2017 at 7:22 PM, Doc Hoy said:

 

 

One "expert" wanted to charge me between four and five thousand to put an ad randomly on the back of the register tape from a local supermarket. Raise your hand if you have ever even turned the register tape over let alone actually read what is on the back of it. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Thanks to you, I just turned over my receipt just to see what was on the back of it.  

 

 

 

KIMG0654.JPG

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5 hours ago, Doc Hoy said:

 

 

 

 

1. Almost no one makes authentic she crab soup. It would be too expensive.

 

3. Almost all she crab soups are good. But none we found were memorable. Ours is not memorable either but it is good and people seem to like it.

 

 

I think that you're onto something.  My perspective is that you can make authentic crab soup.  You do need to price it accordingly, and the customers in that price range will fall in line.  I live in The City.  We see it all the time.  Who would pay $125 for a dry aged, slow roasted, prime rib cooked in a pan of salt?  Full house, 7 days a week, make your reservations 6 weeks in advance, no walk-in seating.  We have a local restaurant on the corner that does not have a menu,  serves only garlic roasted crab, and the price varies depending upon pricing and availability.  They call it "market rate", by the pound.  So when carb is $15 per pound at the local grocery store, where I get coupons on the back of the receipt:  the restaurant wants $45 per pound.  A 3 pound crab is $135.  What?  triple the retail price?  Crazy mark-up, right?  Until you realize that a $20 bottle of wine at the local wine shop, is $60 on a restaurant wine list.  A lot of restaurants try to keep food cost to about 20%.  So a $20 entree has about $4 worth of chicken, pasta, & veggies.    Think about that.  That is a 5X markup.  

In the right market, with a good location, you could be the king of very expensive crab soup.  Maybe a 2 crab soup.  Crab soup loaded with a entire soft shell crab, topped with an entire female crab, with the crab butter and roe in the shell.  Serve it with a salad made from locally sourced fresh vegetables, fresh baked bread,  and home made butter.  We make fresh butter all the time.  I get a quart of whole cream from the local dairy, put it in my Cuisinart food processor, and I get a chunk of fresh butter and fresh buttermilk after about 15 minutes.  Thicken your soup and add a richness to the flavor with that fresh buttermilk, or use it to bake biscuits.   What would you need to do?  Put about $20 worth of crab into each bowl, and charge $100?  You can make your $10,000 a day with 100 bowls of soup.  

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150,

You are right about the 20%. Some of ours are lower and some are higher. If we sell a soup (or anything else for that matter) that has a higher cost, (lower margin) we absorb it to keep the price within our window. We know what our patrons will tolerate. As an example, we have standard soups at 4.00  and 6.00 for a small (yes we do use the word "small") or large respectively.Then we have premium soups at 5.00 and 7.50. We sell sandwiches at 4.00 to 6.00. Ham, Chicken salad, and Turkey have good margin at 4.00. Salmon cake has good margin at 5.00 but Grab cake costs us about 28% at 6.00. Right now, none of our distributors can even get crab roe. If we could get it from a specialty outlet, we'd have to raise the price of our soup. (That would be the soup that everyone buys to the tune of two or three kettles per day.)

ANYWAY>>>>>

My tranny pan gasket is holding after about a week.

 

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Doc, 

I guess it's life in The Big City, as they say.  Larger metropolitan areas like NY, LA, SF, et cetera......people have a different idea of what is in their budget for disposable income, and are much more open to spending more on entertainment.  The demand is here for luxury items.  Part of your roe shortage could be due to a higher demand elsewhere.  If only X amount of roe is produced and in existence, then it goes to the highest bidder.  I was just talking to a friend of mine in the produce industry.  He told me about how he is making a killing importing South American produce from Chile, Peru, Argentina, et cetera......and selling the produce in Japan & China where the super rich will pay a huge retail markup for imported, and sometimes smuggled, luxury items.  Even a pack of American cigarettes, authentic by an American Tax Stamp, in the shirt pocket of a visiting American, can be sold for up to $20 US Dollars.  Imagine how much of our soft shell crab is exported to Japan.  In Asia, US chicken & eggs are coveted.....why?  Bird Flu.  Do you think the King of Thailand will take a chance on eating domestic fowl that may or may not be contaminated?

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Doc, I had a crab soup recently which wasn't even crab soup.  Chicken consomme, garnished with cilantro.  What made it crab soup was that it was served with steamed white asparagus,  a saucer with salmon roe, and a whole garlic roasted, dungeness crab.  You are suppose to crack the crab, and add the asparagus, salmon roe,  crab butter, and crab meat to the soup yourself.   You don't want to know what the restaurant charged for that.

 

5150

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