A Shop That Only Does One Thing
Two generations, one trade, one cinderblock building off State Route 74. Here is how Eastgate Radiators got here — and why we never became a lube-and-tire chain.
Started in 1984 with a torch and a test tank
Dale Hochman had spent a decade fixing radiators for somebody else when he figured he could do it better on his own. In 1984 he leased a two-bay cinderblock shop off Old State Route 74, hung a hand-painted sign, and started re-coring radiators for the farmers, haulers and hot-rodders on Cincinnati’s east side. Back then nearly every car still had a copper-brass core you could rebuild with a torch and patience, and Dale was good with both.
His son Marcus grew up in that shop — sweeping the floor for a dollar, then running parts, then learning to solder a tank without burning a hole through it. He took over the counter in 2011. The building is bigger now and the cars are full of plastic and sensors, but the sign still says the same thing and so does the answer when you ask what we do: radiators and cooling, nothing else.
Why we stayed specialists
Plenty of people told Dale over the years to add oil changes, brakes, tires — the stuff that keeps a general shop busy. He never did, and neither have we. The reason is simple: when cooling is all you do, you get fast and you get right. We can spot a collapsing lower hose by the way it sweats, hear a fan clutch that only fails hot, and recognize a recall-batch plastic tank before it strands you. A shop juggling six trades cannot build that kind of eye, and honestly, we did not want to.
How we treat people
- We diagnose before we sell. You get the cause, the fix and the price before a wrench turns.
- We say when a repair isn’t worth it. If re-coring yours just buys you three months, we will tell you.
- We show you the old parts. Ask, and they go in the box with your keys.
- We stand behind the work. Twelve months on our labor, every job, no asterisk.
Part of this corner of Cincinnati
We are a Clermont County shop through and through — a member of the Clermont Chamber of Commerce, a longtime supporter of the non-profit Car Care Council, and the shop a lot of local mechanics quietly send their own radiator work to. If you have been driving the east side for a while, odds are you have passed us on 74 a thousand times. Next time it runs hot, you will know where to turn in.