At Home Mechanic

I like a clean car. Not just washed and polished, but empty of all flotsam and jetsam. My trunk is empty, there is nothing stuffed under the seats, the map pockets are clear and there is nary a drink in the cup holders. I am funny that way, I don't like top hear things rattle around when I drive.

Timing is everything. The insides of your car's engine is a series of doodads that spin, whirl and go up and down. As long as all those thingies are moving in the correct relationship to each other, your engine runs well and you perceive no problems. But as time passes the gears, chains and belts that connect all those moving parts wear out or even break. Ideally you will keep track of the routine maintenance to prevent major problems. But when you ignore the manufacturer's recommended service intervals, expensive damage can occur.

I just removed the air conditioning out of my hobby car, a 1987 Honda CRX Si. The air conditioning has not been working very well and I was not inclined to repair it, again. Over the course of the 6 years that I have owned this car, I have had an expensive relationship with the air conditioner on this car. I replaced the compressor initially and that required a second trip to the ATM to get enough cash to satisfy the wholesale parts guy.

Car seats have come a long way from the old days. I can remember when car seats had the contour and comfort of a park bench. Covered in shiny vinyl, they offered nothing in terms of support or safety. With the rise in popularity of foreign sports cars in the 1950's, the American public came to recognize the "bucket seat" as a sporting alternative to the three across seating that most domestic cars came with. By the late 1960's American cars with sporting pretensions like the Camaro, Mustang and the like offered high back bucket seating that suggested some lateral support.

Concours d'Elegance has such a nice ring to it. But it seems so many things sound better when you say them in French. In this case the words, Concours d'Elegance has a much classier ring to them than "Car Show." A Car Show can be just a bunch of dusty daily drivers parked in one section of the mall parking lot for the amusement of the local shoppers. But a Concours d'Elegance is literally an examination of elegance, or in this case an examination of beauty. Beautiful cars will not just be shown, but examined and appreciated for their beauty. The French words conjure a much more gentile and refined image that plain old Car Show.

The three most important tools in your garage may not be tools in the traditional sense of the word. Craftsman or Snap-On, or my current favorite Husky (which is the Home Depot house brand) does not make them. You may already be using them and not thinking of them as tools. But for the At Home Mechanic they may become your favorite tools once you realize their value in the garage.

The modern At Home Mechanic can find the service parts to repair his or her car online or in the local auto parts store with ease. The supply of Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEM) parts for cars made in the last 50 years is truly impressive. Need a set of sparkplugs for a 1960 Rambler? Chances are that you can get them delivered to your doorstep within 48 hours.

I hate sunroofs on cars and I have two words to support my position: Greenhouse Effect. The Greenhouse Effect is the property of physics regarding sunlight entering a glass-contained space. The sunlight enters the space through the glass and the reflected heat created by the sunlight is trapped within the glass-shrouded area. It is this principle that allows tropical plants to be grown within greenhouses in temperate climes and it is also the same principle at work turning your car, truck or mini-van into a death chamber for pets and small children locked inside a closed car on a warm day.

"Ya got a Hemi in that?" That is the question posed by a slack yawed yokel to the proud possessor of a shiny new Chrysler product in a series of advertisements. The smug reply from the Chrysler product owner is, "Yeah, its got a Hemi." And then he zooms off in satisfied automotive bliss. The implication is that a Hemi is a good thing, it makes your car more powerful, and ownership of a Hemi entitles you to an elevated level of respect from less worthy cars and their owners.

I received at notice in the mail from the California Department of Motor Vehicles popularly know as the DMV. It is time to renew the registration of my oldest and most beloved of my three cars, the 1987 Honda CRX Si. The cost of registering an older car like my CRX is pretty benign; a total of $51 for the privilege to use all of the public roads, streets and highways in the state of California. And by extension, all the other states in the union will recognize my California registration as a visitor. So all I have to do is slip a check into the mail and my car will proudly display its shiny new registration sticker on the rear license plate. Oh wait. This year I need to have my car's emission system checked and approved before the state of California will accept my check.

General Motors is in big trouble. They have a bloated product line with confusing duplicate models across their various brand names. And the recent steep rise in fuel costs have soured consumers on GM's profit-center, large fuel guzzling vehicles, to the point that they have been forced to offer steep discounts and rebates to reduce the giant inventory of unsold cars off the dealers' lots. Additionally, GM is hampered with a huge contractual commitment to provide health insurance coverage to their employees and their retirees (who now out number current employees) that combine to add $1600 per vehicle in costs not related to making or marketing cars. And if that was not bad enough, General Motors was forced to pay FIAT a $2 billion divorce settlement when it appeared that was a more cost effective move than invest several times that much to complete a corporate merger with the Italian automaker. In balance, all is not well for GM.

Are you a good automotive neighbor? Do you care how your neighbor's view your car hobby practices? Do you want to insure the good will of everyone on your block? How you conduct yourself as an automobile enthusiast can have a huge impact on your image in the community you live in and how society in general views the car hobby.

There is immediate feedback from working on a car, either it runs or it doesn't. And part of the joy of projects in the garage is the instant gratification. We don't get that same instant feedback here on the At Home Mechanic, so it is up to you the readers to make comments to what you read and provide the cheers or jeers for us on this end. Here is a sample of the comments we have been receiving.

This is the first of a three part series on the shape of cars.

Automobiles are shaped all wrong; if the laws of aerodynamics were taken into consideration, all cars would be turn upside down. Of course this would present a packaging challenge to the engineers, but the shape of the automobile should be reversed from its current configuration.

We continue to examine the shape of cars in the second of three parts.

In the 1960's innovative Texas racer car builder and racers Jim Hall introduced the concept of the wing to motor racing. Standing on stanchions well above the car and flying in the clean air traveling above the car's body, Hall's wing was a revolution in extra down force for racecars. But a wing also has a cost in drag, the down force acts like an anchor when you are trying to travel at the greatest speed in straight line. Hall designed his wing to flatten out for the straight and to dip down for extra down force when the brakes were applied for a turn. It was not long before other racers complained and the moveable wing was soon banned. But the floodgates of wings were let loose on nearly every form of auto racing and wings appeared in a bizarre variety.

We continue to examine the shape of cars in this the final installment of three.

For consumer cars, the wing at the rear of the car and the front air dam below the front bumper have become profit centers for manufacturers, dealers and the aftermarket. Rear wings out of all proportion are sprouting on trunk lids. While the aesthetic value of these wings is debatable, their function is nearly nil as they sit on street cars. Creating a hazard to the driver's vision and a comical visual blight upon otherwise respectable automobiles, the rear wing is at best a homage to the truly functional wings that function to create true down force on race cars.

The automobile enthusiast magazines are not your friends. In fact, these magazines will publish deceptive or even flat out wrong information deliberately. And gullible readers will spend their money and waste their time making "improvements" to their car's performance that may not be needed or that actually reduce performance. Is every car magazines evil? Heck no, but a discriminating reader needs to be skeptical of claims and that same reader should know that there may be cheaper alternative ways of achieving the same performance.

The United States is not likely to produce another native born Formula 1 world champion in the foreseeable future. The US can rightfully claim Phil Hill as our only native-born Formula 1 champion and we will also claim Italian-born, but US-raised, Mario Andretti as the last American champion of the world's premier auto race series. I can reliably make the prediction of a dearth of new road racing talent springing from American shores ever again based solely upon the emergence the dominance of one particular type of racing in America. It is a form of auto racing that is sucking the life blood out of every other form of American automotive competition by attracting all of the emerging driving talent into its dark hole. Once attracted like moths to light, these talent young drivers who otherwise could be representing the US on the major road racing courses of the world are enslaved into the grip of this uniquely American form of racing, never letting them escape.

What is the single most vulnerable spot on any car when driven by a new driver? I can say with absolute confidence that the one point on any automobile that is most likely to suffer from a new driver's over confidence is... the right front corner of the car. Even though it is within the line of sight of the driver, because it is slightly off center from where the driver is looking, it might as well be invisible to the new driver.

Automatic Traction Control (ATC) and Anti-lock Brake System (ABS) are a pair of great modern safety features on many modern automobiles that will give less-than-fully attentive drivers a chance to recover from a driving mistake. These systems prevent your tires from skidding, which in turn allows the tire to maintain as much traction as possible. And with that traction, the driver can stop or steer the car away from danger.

How often do you take on a new project on your car? Obviously you can not wait to fix a car that is your daily ride to work, school, etc. But those discretionary jobs, the hot-up jobs, the "make it run better" or "make it look cooler" jobs; how often do you take them on? If you spend every free moment in the garage with the project car your social life is going to suffer. So how do you space out the time you spend playing with the car?

My heart goes out to orphans. Foundlings, puppies and kittens all tug at my heartstrings but the orphans I am speaking about are orphans cars. An orphan car is one whose parent company has gone out of business, leaving a small but loyal group of car owners all alone in the world.

Did you take shop class in Junior High School? Back in the days of adequate public school funding and less emphasis on college preparation, young men were given instruction in the "Manufacturing Arts" and young ladies were taught "Home Economics." Conventional wisdom of the time held that we needed to prepare your youth for their eventual careers: Men on the assembly line and girls at home keeping house. American society has outgrown this quaint anachronism, (although the children's school year is still constructed around a three month summer holiday so the young'uns can be home to help bring in the crop at the family farm). Shop class is now a distant memory for us older folks, kids today are more likely to get a computer arts class that is certainly more relevant to today's job market. Which is kind of a shame since the basic skills learned in shop class are important to the At Home Mechanic.

All I wanted to do was join the club. I figured that if I got a cool old car, I could join the cool old car club. In retrospect, my image of a car club was terribly out of whack with reality. In my fantasy of what a car club should be, I expected to find a group of professional people who gather upon manicured lawns to tastefully appreciate achievements in the automotive arts. Think of a lawn party from The Great Gatsby crossed with a sherry tasting in the Oxford faculty lounge... with some cool old cars in the background. I expect that sort of car club exists somewhere, but not for those of us who appreciate Hondas.

Physics is a daunting topic to most people. All that egghead, Einstein, stuff about splitting the atom and the time space continuum is just to so hard to grasp. So when I say that physics is the single most important topic that an automotive engineer can study and the principles that can be learned from physics are applied to car design and improvement, I can hear you groan and roll your eyes.

The cost of owning an automobile is not restricted to the purchase price, petrol and insurance protection. Maintaining your car has a cost and ignoring your car's preventative routine will end up costing you more in the long run. Motor oil is the lifeblood of your engine, changing it every 3,000 miles is cheap insurance that your engine's innards will live to serve you for as long as you can possible want to own your car. And a regular check of your tire pressure will enhance tire life and reduce fuel consumption.

In Malcolm Gladwell's best selling new book Blink he explains the human phenomenon of making a nearly instantaneous judgment about a person, a place or a situation. Even if we cannot articulate what causes us to form an opinion so quickly, we intuitively react to stimuli based upon small clues that we subconsciously perceive. If your eye does not get all the visual clues it expects from a car's design, your subconscious is inclined to dislike the car.

I made a big mistake; the kind of mistake that many people make. But here I am, the At Home Mechanic, making the kind of mistake that I generally chide other people for making. I am so ashamed; the only way I can repent is to confess my sin. Hopefully you will learn from my mistake and not repeat it.