General Car Tips

General Car Tips Hello Eric the car guy here I have recently gotten a great deal of questions, I think seven enough from Noble Height who is a recent subscriber to Eric the car guy. Rather than responding to each and one of these questions individually, I’m just going to make the short video because perhaps the rest of the class can benefit from the answers to these questions. The first one I have here is but a fluctuating idle on a Honda Accord LXI. Number one cause of fluctuating idle is low coolant and this little air packets in the coolant get into the idle control valve and other places that help control the idle and fool the system in the thinking it’s hot then it’s cold, it’s sort of like coolant just sort of gurgling out through there. The way I believe the cooling system out is I will install what’s called the Spill Free Funnel and when the car for as long as it takes for the cooling fans to cycle so. When I’m running the car what I also do is I hold the RPM somewhere around 2000 to 2500 RPM and I hold it there for like I say into the cooling fans come on. This ensures that the cooling fans are working properly into the thermostat is opening and here’s the most important part of this procedure is you need to turn the heater all the way to the hot position but turn the actual fan off. The most important part of the whole procedure, you want to be able to circulate the coolant through the heater core because that’s normally where the air packets get cut. So try that first but another issue I believe on that particular car is sometimes I had problems with intake gasket leaks and you could check for this by spraying carburetor cleaner around with the intake gasket leaks needs the cylinder had and as the car is running be careful not to spray underneath ignition source because it will catch on fire but if the idle is snooze out then you may very well have an intake gasket leak which could be the source of your fluctuating idle on that case. So the vacuum leaks can also cause fluctuation idle. Hot spots on routers, big lock must thing had a really good point on my drum break video. That breaks are basically designed to take speed and turn it in the heat, that’s their entire design and in that drum break video I talked about minimum specifications. Well there also minimum specifications on routers and you could only machine down to that minimum. But I like less big back must thing. Subscribe at theory that the more metal that you remove from something that this is designed to deal with a lot of heat the more you take away its ability to deal with that heat. So in other words the thinner the metal, the less it’s able to deal with the heat. The more likely it is to work or cause a problem in the future. So I guess what I saying to answer your question is can you machine out those hot spots. It depends on how deep they are to be honest with you and if your machine is down at the minimum spec I would expect it to work or cause a problem again in the not too distant future so you may have to replace them and if you’re having a continual problem it maybe the quality of the routers that you’re using. It could also be an issue with a sticking bear component, such as a sticking caliper that’s causing it. So it’s not releasing properly and being partially applied driving the roads. So there are lots of different factors that could be route cause of this. Next, it does a leaking power steering hose cause that failure of a Pennsylvania State Inspection. In theory now I used to have a Pennsylvania State Inspection and Emissions License and no, it should not however if you have a power steering hose that is leaking directly on to an exhaust component or any form of oily liquids leaking on to an exhaust component, they could get you on the fact that, that is a fire hazard. So if you got oil leaking on exhaust components then that maybe an issue there. That’s kind of a tricky question but that’s really up to the person doing the inspection. So I guess what I’m saying is that yes that is possible but don’t fault the people for failing you because really they’re trying to cover their own butts and save you from catching on fire. Fuel pump replacement, do you have to or if you can’t siphon out the gas what do you do. Some gas tanks actually have a plug on the bottom that you could pull and take out as far as cycling the fuel pump as you would put in your question. Yes, you could do that but if a fuel pump is the problem then you’re wasting your time. Really, these are those “possible scenarios” working in this industry is that yes of course the fuel pumps going to fail and you’re going to have drop the gas tank and it’s going to be full. So you need a really a size 32 jack more than one person. Pretty much whatever you can do to try to get the gas tank out of there and you actually may have to deal with the full tank and that maybe just be what you have to do it. You just may have to deal with it. I k now it’s heavy and it’s cumbersome and the fuels slashing around a bit, it makes it very difficult but more than one person usually helps. By passing the heater hose or by passing the heater core does not affect cooling efficiency. No it does not, not at all. In fact I’ve done it just recently on a Toyota that had a heater core issue. The gentleman asked me to try and fixed it for him without taking as dashboard apart and everything and I did bypass the heater core. The heater core is really there for your comfort as the car really could care less. Different colored coolants. Now the way I understand it was back in a day engines were pretty much cast iron engines and cylinder heads but sometime in the 90’s perhaps it could be for them and manufacturers began to move and more and more towards aluminum as the preferred metal of choice. As a result of this ethylene glycol which is traditional green antifreeze were having chemical reactions with the metal itself sometimes scoring the inside of the aluminum castings. So different many manufacturers came up with different methods to deal with this and came out with their own chemical compounds as a result. So I believe the reason why there are many different colors is because each manufacturer had perhaps their own type of metal that they were using in their engines whatever. They came up with their own chemical compounds and created their own coolants. The reasons why there are different colors to give you a visual clue of don’t mix this color with this color because it makes something really ugly. There are some universal coolants out there. I don’t have a whole lot of experience with that because I'm a type of person who says well if a manufacturer went through all the travel of the designs something to go in their car we’re going to use it, so I don’t have a whole lot of experience using universal coolants. Lastly, plastic shields. Plastic shields underneath the car and metal shields many of the cars that you mentioned that it had shields were really offer a type vehicles and they put those there for a reason say you’re going over something like rocks or logs or whatever. You know what that stuff going up particularly into like your drive belts things like that so those shields on offer a vehicles are really there to keep anything from coming up and making contact with the bottom of the engine or any of those spinning parts of the fun of the engine in particular reaping wires or lines or anything like that off because if you’re all offering let’s face it you’re far away from lots of things. So you really need to be able to think on your feet. As for cars it’s done for air dynamics, air dynamic work in a couple of ways. It’s not just air moving over on objects it’s the air that moves beneath an object that also dictates its aerodynamics so they put that shielding underneath there to try to make underneath of the car more aerodynamic than a bunch of rough surfaces say the bottom of an engine. So they’re not doing it necessarily to give you a bad day. Manufacturers don’t do that. They usually do things because they have to and they usually do it the cheapest way possible. So yes the plastic shield will suffice as far as an air spoiler going under the car but that’s the reason why you have to take that stuff off in order to get to different things up over there. They’re not trying to cover oil leaks that kind of deal. That’s not going to work because as you drive down the road whatever oil leaks and shield is eventually going to drip off the back of it. So it’s going to get somewhere. I hope that answers your questions, if you have anymore fell free to fire away and the rest of you out there if you got other questions I’ll either make a specific video about that but these were all over the place and this video might have been a bit long but I hope you got something from it. You can always visit me at EricTheCarGuy.com and makes me feel good when people go there and stay dirty. See you.