General Maintenance Tips For Your Car

A well maintained vehicle will never let down its owner. It will not desert you when you need it most. Here are a few maintenance tips for your car

Check the Engine Oil: To prevent the engine from deterioration, its important that the engine maintains the amount of oil it is programmed to receive. Negligence in doing so will lead to a deteriorating engine performance, meaning you'll get falling mileage.

Make Sure the Lights are working properly: It is important for the lights to be properly focused, for your own and for the oncoming vehicle's safety. Travel on low beam so that it does not obstruct your view instead of helping you along.

Have Suitable Tyre Pressure: The required amount of air pressure needs to be strictly maintained if your car is to get the right mileage and pick-up. Make sure pressure is not to high or you'll shorten the life of your tyres.

Radiator Water: If your engine uses water for cooling, take care to ensure that it is regularly changed.

Some other tips...
Get your vehicle serviced only at authorized service stations
Check the engine oil level once every two weeks. Also check the levels of coolant and water in the radiator and battery.
Always use genuine spare parts.
Avoid accelerating and braking abruptly.
Shut up the engine whenever you expect to wait.
Drive at a moderate speed of 45-55 km/h to maximize fuel efficiency.
Use air-conditioning only when necessary.
Avoid riding on the clutch pedal, and release the clutch pedal fully while driving.
Maintain optimum air pressure in your tyre to improve mileage.

How To Make your engine perform more efficiently

Try increasing displacement - the more displacement means the more power you’ll because it burns more gas during each revolution of the engine (Not very feul saving). Try making the cylinders bigger or by adding more cylinders. 12 seems to be the limit.

Modify the compression ratio – You can produce more power by increasing compression ratios. The more air/fuel mixture is compressed the more power it will generate, however the more likely it is to spontaneously burst into flame (prior to the spark plug igniting it). Higher octane gasolines prevent this sort of early combustion. High-performance cars generally use high octane gasoline – because the engines use high compression ratios.

Stuff more into each cylinder - you can get more power from the cylinder, if you can cram more air (and therefore fuel) into a cylinder of a given size. Turbo chargers and super chargers pressurize the incoming air to effectively cram more air into a cylinder.

Cool the incoming air – It get pretty hot when compressing air. You would like to have the coolest air possible in the cylinder because the hotter the air is the less it will expand when combustion takes place. An intercooler is a special radiator through which the compressed air passes to cool it off before it enters the cylinder. Therefore many turbo charged and super charged cars have an intercooler.

Let air come in more easily - As a piston moves down in the intake stroke, air resistance can rob power from the engine. Air resistance can be lessened dramatically by putting two intake valves in each cylinder. Some newer cars are also using polished intake manifolds to eliminate air resistance there. Bigger air filters can also improve air flow.

Let exhaust exit more easily - If air resistance makes it hard for exhaust to exit a cylinder, it robs the engine of power. Air resistance can be lessened by adding a second exhaust valve to each cylinder (a car with 2 intake and 2 exhaust values has 4 valves per cylinder, which improves performance - when you hear a car ad tell you the car has 4 cylinders and 16 valves, what the ad is saying is that the engine has four valves per cylinder). If the exhaust pipe is too small or the muffler has a lot of air resistance then this can cause back-pressure which has the same effect. High-performance exhaust systems use headers, big tail pipes and free-flowing mufflers to eliminate back-pressure in the exhaust system. When you hear that a car has "Dual Exhaust", the goal is to improve the flow of exhaust by having two exhaust pipes instead of one.

Try making everything lighter - The lighter the piston, the less energy it takes. Lightweight parts help the engine perform better. Each time a piston changes direction it uses up energy to stop the travel in one direction and start it in another.

Inject the fuel - This improves performance and fuel economy.
Fuel injection allows very precise metering of fuel to each cylinder.

How to Clean a Car Battery

What You Need

* Baking Soda and Stiff Brush
* Rubber Gloves
* Wrench to Fit Cable Clamp
* Wrench to Remove Battery
* Waterproof Grease

1. After loosening the cable clamps and battery holder, remove the battery from vehicle.

2. Begin by cleaning the entire battery top of dirt and oxidation using baking soda and water.

3. While battery is out, clean the cable clamps until shiny with the #535 brass brush.

4. Re-install battery in vehicle. Re-attach clamps and cover the connection with grease.