Seelye Auto Group hosts Girls Build Kalamazoo for Garage Workshop

We were very excited to host Girls Build Kalamazoo again for a garage workshop here at Seelye Ford of Kalamazoo & Seelye Kia of Kalamazoo! The young ladies who joined us learned a bit about owning, maintaining, and repairing minor things on vehicles, preparing them for their future cars!

Here’s a quick video covering the 2 hour sessions held at Seelye Kia of Kalamazoo:

Seelye Ford Service Manager Kevin Robinson, Seelye Select Service Manager Brandon Dailey, technicians Victor Carson, Kim Mayo, Josh Snider, and Seelye Ford technology and delivery coordinator Lauren Laipply led the girls through:

General Vehicle Safety

This covered normal expectations of what the vehicle is, and how to safely work around it.

Preparedness in case something happens

Covered easy, inexpensive options to help better prepare and equip yourself in the event of an emergency or minor repair. Obviously no one would be able to carry around an entire service department with them, but some easy tools make life much easier in some repairs.

Problem solving to best utilize what you have available

Here we covered slowing down and thinking about how you can tackle problems as they come up, either by making them possible or easier than just going at the problem head on. An example we did was increasing your leverage with a longer bar, and in the event you need something to block the tires with, you could find wood or rocks nearby to work in a pinch.

Situational and visibility awareness

Here we covered some environmental factors in the event we’re working on the car, or have to do a side of the road repair. In the event you have to pull over to the side of the road, we covered ideas on how to make sure we’re visible to other drivers, thinking about are we clear of inbound traffic, making sure we try to not park on hard to see places or just over the crest of a hill. When needing to lift a car outside of a controlled garage space, we consider any forces that may influence the car if we try to lift it, such as rolling forward or backward or being unstable to work on.

How to change a tire

Here we covered how and where to lift the car from with different types of jacks, how to chalk the tires to prevent rolling, we learned how to break the lugnuts loose (but not off) beforehand then how to lift the car, how to do shake test to make sure the vehicle is stable once we’ve got it off the ground.  Once we got it off the ground, we learned to use our spare wheel and tire as an extra safety while we remove the wheel and tire. Following getting the new wheel and tire on, we learned how to use a star or crisscross pattern to evenly tighten the wheel on.

How to patch a tire

Here we learned how to patch a tire in the event we picked a nail, or had some other type of puncture. We also learned where within the tire tread is safe to patch and then drive on, and where in the tread is not safe to patch or attempt to drive on.

Under the hood maintenance

Near the end of our session we went through a few easy key points on how and where to check for different fluids to ensure the cars can operate normally and be kept from neglect or disrepair.

Thanks you for joining us, we were very glad to have you here to learn and empower you!

If you’re not familiar with Girls Build Kalamazoo, their mission:

Founded in 2020, Girls Build Kalamazoo is a non-profit organization formed from a passion to make Kalamazoo a more inclusive place to live and work by providing opportunities to young women in the community.

Girls Build Kalamazoo envisions a world where young women, especially from BIPOC communities, are empowered, confident leaders. With our focus on careers in the traditionally male-dominated fields of construction, trades, and science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM), as well as real estate and entrepreneurship, we offer middle and high school girls the tools they need to build a future they can be proud of.

Our goal in everything we do is to help our girls Make It.