You can depend on your car to take you to work, school, and anywhere you want to go. Your car, in turn, relies on you to take care of it.
Keep your car engine in top shape to extend its lifespan and maintain your vehicle’s heart. How do you go about maintaining the heart of your vehicle?
The Car Engine
The car engine is an ecosystem made up of many parts. These basic engine parts include but do not limit to:
- Cylinder: Numbers from four to eight cylinders, which can be arranged as V (Vee), flat, or inline (this is the case of four cylinders lined up).
- Spark plug: Sets fire needed for the fuel and air mixture to explode, creating combustion.
- Valves: Serves as gateways for air and fuel to enter and exhaust to go out.
- Piston: Moves up and down inside the cylinder.
- Crankshaft: Transfers the power generated from the engine to the wheels. Your car’s wheels are just as important but they can spin around all sorts of objects from the road that might damage your car. Fender flares Ford Ranger among other custom-made fenders help protect your car at all cost.
The intricacy of what goes behind the scene for your car to perform gives you all the more reasons to give your car engine routine love and affection.
Change Your Engine Oil
If the engine is the heart of your car, then the engine oil is its blood. This fluid lubricates the parts so they can move freely. The friction created keeps the parts from being in contact with each other and lessens their wear and tear.
More importantly, the engine oil filters out unwanted particles and debris that can harm the engine. Over time, the oil thickens and its additives that weed out the harmful particles would have spent.
There’s no general rule on when’s the perfect time to change your oil. It could be 3,000 miles, 5,000 miles, at a 3-month interval and so on. Your best bet is to go over your car manual and find the answer there.
The change oil service at the lube shop can go from $20 upwards. You can do it yourself for half the price with the right tools and materials: oil with the correct grade and quantity, new oil filter, wrenches, and rags.
Change the Spark Plug
It is that proverbial spark that powers your car. But spark plugs grow old, faulty, and damaged. It’s time to replace yours when:
- The “Check Engine” light comes on or blinks. One main reason for this is a faulty spark plug that can use misfiring and results in your car stalling
- Your car has trouble starting. With the stalls noted above, you might leave the battery out and look into your spark plug.
- Your car consumes more fuel than usual. When your spark plug has run its course, it can consume more fuel necessary to power the engine.
Replacing spark plugs is not as routine as oil changes as your car can run for thousands of miles before you need to change your plug. But don’t just ignore the signs asking for you to replace it.
Check Your Cooling System
You owe it to your car’s cooling system to ‘Keep Your Car Engine in Top Shape’ and prevent overheating. It’s made possible by the engine coolant, or known familiarly as antifreeze, that runs back and forth between the radiator and the engine.
This coolant can thicken over time as its additives lose their protective properties. It can also leak and seep through other parts of the engine like the cylinders.
You can do a routine check on your coolant’s condition especially its color and viscosity. Routinely flush your cooling system as recommended in your car manual.
There’s nothing that routine maintenance can’t do in keeping your car at its best condition.
