If you are having cooling system problems with your car, truck, or SUV, such as intermittent or continuous elevated engine temperature, the presence of a cold lower radiator hose may help in the diagnosis of the problem. This can be true because a cold lower hose is an indicator that coolant (antifreeze) is not properly … Read more
CVT stands for Continuously Variable Transmission. The first CVT patent was awarded to Daimler-Benz in 1886. The CVT concept had been applied to saw mill machinery seven years earlier by an inventor named Milton Reeves. Down through the decades, CVTs have appeared in numerous automobiles, motorcycles and more recently in snowmobiles and ATVs. As you … Read more
For automobiles and light trucks, braking systems with disc brakes utilize friction elements called brake pads. During every stopping event, the considerable energy of your car’s motion is effectively converted to heat by the brakes at each of the wheels. During normal driving, this process repeats over and over. While brake caliper parts will become … Read more
Radiator hoses convey engine coolant to and from the radiator. The upper hose carries hot coolant from the engine to the radiator. The lower hose carries the cooled fluid back to the water pump and then back into the engine. The water pump circulates this coolant continuously while the engine is running. These hoses are … Read more
If you drive a conventional car, it will likely have five lug nuts (or bolts) at each wheel (some models only have four). These twenty fasteners could be the most important ones on your entire car. That’s because if five of them on any wheel break or come off while you’re driving, you will most … Read more
When planning to perform a brake job you will always be faced with these three questions: Should I replace the rotors? Or should I simply have them resurfaced? And how do I decide? Before digging into this topic let’s point out that for most brake jobs the rotors should either be resurfaced or replaced. Not … Read more
Threaded fasteners of many types have been developed over centuries and are generally used to hold two or more parts together. In this article we will include pretty much all types of metal fasteners under the single term, bolt. If all goes well in a lifetime, every bolt needed to be removed simply comes out … Read more
The gasoline or diesel engine in your car or truck produces the necessary power to push you down the road. At the same time, that engine produces a considerable amount of waste energy in the form of heat. And that heat must be extracted from the mechanisms inside the engine and efficiently dumped to the … Read more
As we already wrote about in our in-depth Plasti Dip guide, Plasti Dip is flexible, non-slip specialty rubber coating that comes in a huge variety of colors. It can be easily applied to tool handles, vehicles (wheels, painted surfaces, trim, badges, etc.), and many other creative uses via spraying, dipping, or brushing. The beauty of … Read more
Quite a variety of gasoline-fueled piston engines are offered in today’s automobiles. One thing all have in common is spark plugs. And spark plugs are a periodic maintenance item in your car. A properly functioning spark plug will take the electrical signal from the car battery to the ignition coil and create a spark to … Read more