If you do regular car maintenance yourself, you know you need to doublecheck your coolant levels, and top your radiator with fresh antifreeze whenever necessary. Well now a viral TikTok mechanic reveals that many of us have been opening jugs of antrifreeze—and other automotive liquids—the wrong way.

If you’re anything like me, you always unscrew the top of most jugs of replacement fluids for your car and sigh. Why? There’s often an annoying foil cover sealing the jug. 

Getting the jug open require you get a knife or try and punch a hole in it with your thumb. But then you have the bits of the foil you must fish out of the liquid, or risk pouring them into your engine. In the case of antifreeze, you often end up with the toxic liquid on your fingers. Not good.

Shaun Umscheid is an automotive enthusiast and welder based out of Alberta, Canada. He’s gained fame through his TikTok @WhatNoooWaaay, in which he responds to viral auto repair hacks. He admits the foil inside antifreeze jugs annoys him too. “How many times have you taken the cap off and then tried to stick your fingers through the seal? If you don’t have nails, it’s impossible to push through. So you end up stretching it, and then you still need a knife. Frustrating.”

Umscheid always assumed this was a design flaw. “Honestly, I’m tired of stabbing at it like this. There should just be a tab to peel it off.” Little did he know the designers had things all figured out.

@Burkes.Auto.Repair shows a faster way to open an anti-freeze jug

When @Burkes.Auto.Repair posted a now viral TikTok silently showing the jug designers included an easier way to open these foil seals, Umscheid was all over it. The method is not the tab that Umscheid would have added. But it may be much more clever. Here’s the short Burke’s video.

The mechanic shows that the plastic safety tab holding the cap on the jug has a sharp, blade-like edge. If you flip the cap over, you can pierce the foil with this tool. But there’s more. The little blade is perfectly spaced so you can simply spin the cap around the bottle’s neck and fully detach the foil seal.

The top comment on Burkes’ video is naturally, “where’s the what no way guy?”

The @NoooWaaay guy weighs in

Umscheid couldn’t resist. He reposted the original video with a stitched response. He wandered around his shop, found an unopened jug, then tried the cap trick.

“So, we take it off, and it stretches. Then you just pull that. Wait, no way! Look how easily it cuts. That’s way easier than how I’ve been doing it all this time. Seriously, much better.” You can see his stitch embedded below:

I’ll add that this is one of many viral automotive hacks making the rounds. A shocking number of objects we use repeatedly have clever design features most of us miss.

A few of my favorites include. For example, motor oil quarts are actually engineered to pour in a straight line but we’re all using them upside-down. Some automakers, such as Toyota, have oil fill openings you can thread a quart jug into. If you ever have a stuck ratchet strap, know the hole in the ratchet’s frame is to insert a screwdriver to use as a lever. You can tell when your wipers are bad because windshield wipers have an indicator window that turns yellow when the rubber deteriorates. And don’t get me started on jackstands. Not only do they have a tab you need to bend so they don’t fall apart, but jackstands are perfectly designed to fit under a floor jack.