More Tips
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The top 5 reasons you may want to consider changing your oil more frequently if: 5)
You drive like a knucklehead: jackrabbit starts, heavy acceleration
or high-speed driving |
| 1.
To keep your headlights clear, wipe them with car wax. The water
repellents in the wax will work to keep the slush and salt from
accumulating on the headlights. 2. Ice-proof your windows by spraying them with a vinegar mixture at night. Use 3 parts vinegar to one part water. If there is already ice on the windows, spray with the mixture to melt it off. 3. Prevent your car doors from sticking by spraying the rubber seals around the doors with cooking spray and rubbing it in with a paper towel. This will prevent the water from melting into the rubber therefore it wont freeze at night. 4. Use shaving cream to prevent your windows from fogging. Spray some on the inside of your windows then wipe off with paper towels. Apparently, shaving cream contains some of the same ingredients as commercial defoggers. 5. If your windshield wipers are leaving streaks or squeaking, wipe them with a cloth saturated in alcohol or ammonia. The build up of grease and grime can be cut by these two solvents. It restores wipers to near perfect clarity. 6. De-ice a lock with hand sanitizer gel. It contains alcohol which is the main ingredient in commercial de-icers. Put the sanitizer on the key and the lock. The gel must contain at least 60% alcohol or it wont work. The same holds true for sanitizing the hands, anything less than 60% and you're wasting your money. 7. Stuck in the snow? use your floor mat. Turn off the car, put the rubber side of the mat under the spinning tire. Turn the car back on, step on the gas and it'll give you the grip you need to get moving again. |
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Don't fill
up if you see the tanker Keep the
Moisture out Keep the
Critters out Ahhh, about
your Rear End |
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Drive with care everyday Being car considerate shouldn't stop after the break-in. Drive with care every day and your car will reward you with longer intervals without repair. - Do not race your car's engine during start-up. This is a quick way to add years of wear to your engine, especially if it's cold outside.- Accelerate slowly when you begin your drive.The most wear to the engine and drive train occurs in the first ten to twenty minutes of operation. - Warming the engine by letting it idle in the driveway is not a smart idea. The engine doesn't operate at its peak temperature, resulting in incomplete fuel combustion, soot deposits on cylinder walls, oil contamination, and ultimately damaged components. - Put less strain on your engine and automatic transmission by shifting to neutral at red lights. Otherwise, the engine is still working to push the car even while it's stopped. - Avoid driving at high speeds and accelerating quickly, especially when it's very hot or very cold outside. Such driving behavior will result in more frequent repairs. - Extend the life of your tires with careful driving. Observe posted speed limits. Avoid fast starts, stops, and turns. Avoid potholes and objects on the road. Don't run over curbs or hit the tire against the curb when parking. And, of course, don't burn rubber. - When turning your steering wheel, don't hold it in an extreme right or left position for more than a few seconds. Doing so can damage the power-steering pump. - Consolidate your short driving trips. Most of the wear and tear -- as well as the pollution your car generates -- takes place in the first few minutes of driving. Doing several errands at once, during low traffic hours if possible, will keep your engine happier longer. |
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Reassembly: Keep From Nicking Those Newly Painted Car Doors RESTORATION
TIP Before attempting to mount your doors, gently adhere masking tape to the outside edges of the doorjamb area on the body. This will help prevent the door's sharp edges from getting nicked or scraping the paint off the jamb edges. The tape can be removed as soon as the door is mounted in place. Now it's time for the floor jack. Car doors are quite heavy and bulky, so it is a big mistake to try holding one in space while aligning to the hinges. Even with a helper holding one end of the door, this job almost always ends up with damage. It's just too hard to keep the door aligned while fighting with its weight. Here's a better way. Take a scrap piece of 2x4 and wrap it with a towel. Place the piece on your floor jack and raise the jack to the approximate bottom height of the door. Lay the door's flat bottom onto the wrapped piece of wood, taking the time to balance it. Now all you have to do is keep the door from falling off, which is easily done with one hand. Position the jack such that you can roll the front of the door up to the hinges and then adjust the height until the door can be pushed into place. You will find this very easy to do because there is no physical effort on your part. This will allow you to be patient. |
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Preserve your car during long-term storage If you are
not going to use your car for more than a month, store it properly
to prevent unnecessary damage and repairs upon your return. |
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Be patient during the break-in period You've bought
your dream car and now you want to make it last as long as possible
in top condition. Here are some things to remember as you pull
it out of the dealer's lot: |
| Lighten
up your Key Chain
Does your car key share a chain with a dozen or more other keys? That's a pretty heavy load hanging off the car key when it's in the ignition. The weight, combined with bouncing while you drive, can wear out the tumblers inside the ignition and eventually lead to ignition switch failure. To add years of service to your ignition switch, purchase a lightweight key chain that allows you to separate your ignition key from the others. Drive with only the ignition key in your ignition. If your ignition key "sticks" when you try to turn on the car, it's a warning that your ignition switch is about to fail. Replace it before you get stranded. |
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Use Upholstery Cleaners on soiled seats The same upholstery cleaners you use at home can be used on your car's upholstery. Use them sparingly, however, to avoid saturating the fabric. Use a clean cloth to wipe away the foam. On velour seats, brush the fibers gently to avoid matting them and to preserve the original texture of the fabric. |
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Keeping Track of Flaws When you are painting a panel, door or whole car, you often find yourself seeing flaws in the surface. While those flaws are on your mind as you find them, they are easy to lose sight of later. Eventually you forget where some of them are and only see them after spraying your finish. We find that there is one sure way to "remember" those flaws. We've used it for many years and it's never failed to help us take care of defects without losing them. It's also about as cheap a solution as can be: chalk. That's right; just keep a stick of chalk (any color) in your hand as you inspect the body of a car or just a single panel. When you find a flaw simply circle it with chalk. Later, when you come back to fix all the defects you can wipe the chalk away as you go, or wait until you wet-sand the surface. Chalk doesn't mar any finish and doesn't chemically react with undercoats or top finishes. Unlike other methods (bits of masking tape, dabs of white-out, post-its) that might leave a blush in the paint, chalk just goes away during surface preparation. |
| Don't
Struggle With That Hose!
Sometimes putting on a new radiator hose can be a monumental task. Stretching and pushing the hose end over a water pump bib or radiator outlet can take all the energy you can muster, not to mention result in skinned knuckles. There's got to be a better way, right? Yes, there is, so bear in mind that rubber needs two conditions to allow it to flex and stretch: temperature and lubrication. Cold rubber doesn't stretch very well, so keep the hose indoors overnight before you attempt to put it on the fitting. Alternatively you can heat it (carefully!) with a heat gun or just put the end in your pocket for a while. Lubrication is essential to get a hose to slip over a connection. The best materials to use are silicon lubricant, soapy water or Armor All. Just wet down the inner surface of the hose and push away, being careful not to bend or otherwise damage delicate copper, aluminum or plastic hose fittings. Don't use petroleum-based grease or oil. It might react with the rubber eventually and cause failure. |
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Don't Just Pull That Tape! This happens all too often to those of us painting our cars: we mask freshly painted areas of a hood, trunk lid, door, etc., to prevent overspray while painting the other surfaces and then find the tape pulls off some of the paint that it was stuck to. Ouch! Yes, we should have used special masking tapes that are designed for such applications, but there wasn't any on hand. We took the risk and paid the consequences alright, but isn't there some way to get that "normal" masking tape off without damaging the nice finish? Yes there is, and it's just a few feet away from you. It's a heat gun - or hair blower if you don't have a heat gun. All you need to do to remove masking is to gently (GENTLY!) heat the tape as you pull it away. The adhesive will soften enough to prevent pulling the paint off, leaving just a little film that can be cleaned off with a mild solvent or waxing. This technique is great for removing tape that's been on surfaces for a long time, too. We've tried it on tape that was wrapped around some parts that had been stored for over 5 years and it came right off! |
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Don't Scratch Those Fenders! We have the same problem everyone else does: trying not to scratch the fender while leaning over the engine bay. We've got commercial fender protectors, of course, but they sit folded up in the garage and over time get impregnated with dirt and grit. Also, we tend to forget to pull them out when a "simple" job needs to be performed. That's why we think there's a better way to go about protecting the fenders. The answer for us is binder clips (spring-type paper clips)! Yes, these little black spring clips are terrific for use in protecting your fenders - or anywhere else for that matter. Instead of a fender protector we use an old blanket or bedspread. We fold it over and lay it on the fender, clipping it to the flange around the hood opening area using the binder clips. It's quick and easy and offers the advantage of being able to shake the dust and dirt out of the cloth, or even washing it when it's really dirty. |
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Whitewall Tire Trick We had an unusual problem with a set of new whitewall tires. Once the tires were mounted we cleaned off the blue soapy coating that's always applied to them for protection. Underneath the coating we found that the whitewalls weren't very bright white, but rather a dingy yellow-brown color as if they were dirty. This started a cleaning process that frustrated us for quite a while. First we scrubbed the whitewalls with Dobie pads and spray cleaner and got nowhere. There was no improvement, so next we got out the SOS pads and scrubbed away. That too yielded no improvement, so we started to assume that the discoloration was all the way through the whitewall. To address this situation we tried cleaning areas of one whitewall with solvents. First we tried PrepSol and then lacquer thinner. We also tried to scrub the areas with steel wool and solvent, once again to no avail. We were running out of ideas and resigning ourselves to having dingy whitewalls and decided to clean up all the stuff and go away. Just before leaving we thought that maybe it would be worth sanding the outer layer of white to see if the color was penetrating all the way into the rubber. We then tested a small area by sanding with 150-grit wet/dry paper and, much to our surprise, a rubbery brown material started sanding away, revealing a much whiter layer. We sanded some more and found that the whitewall was, well, white! We got a bucket of water and more sandpaper and set out to sand all four tires. One hour later we had sanded off the dingy layer and had four sparkling white tires! What the material was and why it wouldn't come off with steel wool or solvents is beyond us, but now the tires look great and clean up with the more conventional methods. Who'd have thought? |
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Those Darn Metal Shavings! If you have one of those strong, right-angled welding magnets you've run across the bane of their existence: metal shavings. These magnets - and to a lesser extent, any magnets kept in the workshop - are very good at attracting piles of sharp, dirty and difficult-to-remove metal shavings. What to do? We've tried wiping the shavings off and in the process learned the importance of using work gloves. This technique works, but the gloves get filthy and the shavings tend to cut and shred the material. Blowing the shavings off with compressed air works too, but that just scatters the shavings around your garage. Better yet, why not wrap the magnet in plastic wrap? A couple layers of plastic wrap will last quite a while and when the shavings get piled up the entire wrap can be peeled off and discarded. An alternative to this technique is to use a ziplock bag for the same purpose. Either way, these little tricks make life a bit easier. |
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Storing That Respirator Most of us use respirators that utilize chemical cartridges to purify the air coming in. These cartridges get saturated with contaminants after a while and have to be discarded, but anyone who uses a respirator already knows that. Many don't know that leaving a respirator out on the counter or hung on a hook causes the cartridge to become saturated. Air moves in and around the cartridge and, over time, a perfectly good cartridge becomes unusable. That's why replacement cartridges are kept in sealed containers. We find that the best way to prevent premature cartridge failure is to keep the respirator in a large ziplock freezer bag. These bags are inexpensive and do a very good job of sealing the respirator from outside air and other chemical contaminants. It also keeps the respirator free from dust while it sits around the workshop. |
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Storing small parts for your classic car project When dismantling your classic car it's a good idea to store small parts in plastic bags, and label them to make things easier when it comes time for re-assembly. Usually we write our labels directly on the bag with a felt-tipped pen. However after an extended time, moving parts around causes the labels to wear off. A safer idea is to write your label on an index card and put it in the bag with the part. |