All Auto

May 25th, 2010

Car Maintenance For Safer Driving

If you own a motor vehicle, there are certain things that need to be done on a regular basis to ensure safe and comfortable driving. Some people love doing car maintenance and will happily spend hours tinkering, tuning and cleaning their beloved vehicle. Others will avoid it like the plague. Even if your motor works well and does not appear to have any noticeable problems, it is always worth having it professionally serviced annually so that if there is anything that is beginning to wear, it can be renewed before a problem ensues. Keeping your car properly maintained and in good order will make it last longer and will cost you less to run. Check your tyres, oil, water and windscreen wash reservoir weekly and always before embarking on a long journey.

Make sure your tyres are inflated to the correct level. Checking regularly means that you will see any unusual wear or if there are any other problems. Under inflated tyres wear out more quickly and make your vehicle work harder and therefore it will consume more fuel. Over inflated tyres can cause dangerous blowouts and can make the control of the vehicle more difficult as the steering will feel light. Remember to check your spare wheel too, if you have a puncture and need to change wheels it would be a disaster if you discover the spare too was unusable. It is also very important that you ensure that the tread of your tyres conform to the legal requirements of your country. The correct amount of tread also means safer motoring when it comes to driving in adverse conditions and also for your stopping distances. If the fronts are beginning to show a little wear, swap them over with the rears, which tend to wear less quickly than the fronts.

When your vehicle goes in for its annual service make sure it has an oil change. Over time, the oil becomes thick and sticky with particulates suspended in it making it damaging to the engine. It also heats up very quickly and could cause damage or some other problem. Once it has its oil change, regularly check the levels for optimum performance. Make sure you use the same oil that the garage has used for complete continuity.

Washing your car regularly will also help to keep it in good condition. Using a power washer means that you can give the wheel arches a really good clean as debris collects here and will cause rust or other decay. If you have alloy wheels, using a power washer also lets you clean the wheels which removes brake dust and other debris. Again, doing this regularly prevents corrosion damage. You can give the paintwork a really good shampoo and then polish off with a special wax. If you are using one of those home power washers, do make sure that you use a proper car shampoo as it has been specifically produced to wash and protect the paintwork.

Car maintenance is an important part of safe and comfortable motoring and those few minutes spent checking before a journey, could save you time and trouble.

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Car Wax and Car Paint Sealant

June 23rd, 2010

A car care enthusiast will take great pleasure on a Sunday afternoon from admiring the shine he has just created on his car.

If you are interested in maintaining that showroom look you need more than elbow grease. You will also need quality products, especially when it comes to getting a nice shine onto your car using wax or paint sealant. Both will give you a lasting shine and both need to be applied regularly, so what’s the difference?

Ok, first off, wax and car paint sealant achieve the same desired effect. They are both paint protectors. They are designed to be applied after you have polished your car’s paintwork. The tiny abrasions and scratches in your paintwork is reduced or removed with polish. As it is designed to restore your paintwork to its original colour and shine, polish is slightly abrasive which also means that it will remove any wax that was previously applied leaving your paintwork unprotected. This is where wax and paint sealant comes in. It is applied after the polish has done its work in order to protect it.

By saying that they both achieve the same thing, hopefully that also infers that you don’t need both. Some people think that they need to apply paint sealant before they apply wax. This is not the case. You can do if you so choose but you don’t really gain anything. So, you have a personal choice to make. Paint sealant or wax.

Right, back to the original question. What’s the difference?

The ingredients make all the difference. If the product contains any naturally occuring waxy substance such as Carnauba wax then it is a wax. If it is made from synthetic ingredients and contains no naturally occurring wax then it is a paint sealant.

However, there is another problem. There are no laws to stop a car sealant manufacturer calling their product a wax. The reason they do this is that that majority of people who will buy their product know they want to wax their car. They will therefore look for a wax in the shop. The majority of people won’t care whether it is synthetic or not as long as it does the job they want it to do.

So, the choice is a personal one. If you prefer to work with natural wax then look for a wax. If you prefer to work with synthetics then look for a paint sealant. Don’t go by the product name though. You need to look at the ingredients, just to be sure.

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Toyota Recall Might Be Caused by Cosmic Rays

July 30th, 2010

It may not lessen Toyota’s woes to hear that the problems the company has been having with faulty gas pedals could be blamed on cosmic rays from space. Sound unbelievable? The concept is actually a lot more plausible than you might think.

Toyota’s sticky gas pedals caused sudden and unintended acceleration in several of the automaker’s top-selling Toyota and Lexus-brand cars, which led to a massive recall of more than 9 million vehicles worldwide, beginning in November. While ongoing inquiries attempt to locate the source of the problem and figure out a fix, investigators might find it useful to examine a far-out culprit: cosmic ray radiation from deep in the cosmos, which has been known to plague vulnerable data and memory chips in electronics.

Cosmic rays could be at least partially to blame for Toyota’s mechanical defects, scientists now say. And the problem could get worse in the future, as the increasing use of tiny computer chips — replacing mechanical parts — makes cars more and more vulnerable to space radiation.

More sensitive electronics

Federal regulators were prompted to look into the possible role that cosmic rays played in Toyota’s product recall fiasco after an anonymous tipster suggested the design of Toyota’s microprocessors, software and memory chips could make them more vulnerable to interference from radiation compared with other automakers. This is because Toyota has led the auto industry in its widespread inclusion of electronic controls in the manufacture of their various car models.

As electronic devices are made to perform more and more functions on smaller circuit chips, the systems become more sensitive and vulnerable to corruption, and thus more prone to interference from radiation, said Ewart Blackmore, a senior researcher at TRIUMF, a cyclotron facility in Vancouver, Canada, that works with companies to test and analyze the effects of radiation on products.

“Radiation is certainly a potential cause of Toyota’s problems,” Blackmore told LiveScience. “What’s not known is what direction Toyota and other automakers are taking in terms of finding and correcting these issues.”

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