Girls Auto Clinic Glove Box Guide Read online

  4. Place the dipstick back in the hole and push it all the way down into the engine. The tip of the dipstick will reach the oil pan.

  5. Pull the dipstick all the way out and read the oil level on its tip. You want the level to be between the F and L or Max and Min indicators.

  Engines on almost all cars hold 4 to 5 quarts of oil, and, ideally, the oil level will be full or close to full.

  An oil level at or below minimum or low needs to be dealt with ASAP. But you don’t want to overfill the engine and oil pan either. Too much oil in your engine will increase pressure and could lead to your blowing an engine head gasket. If the level is too high, take your car to your PCT and have some of the oil drained off.

  If there’s no oil on your dipstick (mechanics call this bone dry), there is little to no oil in your engine and you are at risk of causing major damage. Either you have a leak somewhere, or you haven’t changed your oil in a really, really long time. You will need to add at least 3 quarts of oil and then take your car to a mechanic to have things checked out.

  If the oil level is at the Min or Low mark, your engine is probably pretty unhappy. You’re likely to need an oil change (not just a refill), and you may notice your car running a little rougher. It’s missing that good lube! Take your car in for an oil change as soon as possible; if you’ve just had an oil change, you may have a leak, so turn right around and pay another visit to your PCT.

  How does the oil look? Dark brown or black oil needs to be changed. Black particles usually indicate a lack of regular oil changes and some sludge buildup in the engine. Your PCT may recommend a fluid flush to clean things up.

  How to Add Oil to Your Engine

  If you haven’t already, it’s time to head to the parts store to pick up the right type of oil for your engine (see page 97 if you need a refresher). You’ll also need a rag, a small funnel, and gloves to protect your hands.

  1. Locate the oil filler cap, which sits on top of the engine. It will either say “engine oil” or be marked with an oil symbol (the little oil canister with a droplet coming from its spout).

  2. Remove the cap and place it in a safe spot. (People lose their caps all the time.) Place the funnel in the fill hole.

  3. Add oil. Pour a quart of the oil (usually one bottle) into the funnel, taking care not to leak any oil on parts around the oil pan. Oil can cause damage to rubber parts, so be sure to wipe up any spills. Replace the cap after the first quart.

  4. Turn the engine on for a few seconds to help the oil circulate. Turn off the engine, then check the level using your dipstick.

  5. Adjust. If the oil level is still too low, add another quart, repeating steps 3 and 4.

  DIY #4: How to Check and Add Coolant

  Coolant leaks and overheating issues are common, especially on cars whose mileage is getting above 100,000. They can have various causes, from the radiator cracking and rubber hoses breaking down to the thermostat getting stuck. You won’t necessarily be able to diagnose the underlying issue, but an awareness of your coolant level will help you make sure your engine temperature is properly regulated at all times. When should you check your coolant?

  • Before going on a road trip longer than two hours

  • Monthly once the car passes the 100,000-mile mark

  • Weekly if you have a small coolant leak

  How to Check Your Coolant

  The only tool you need to check your coolant? Your eyes. But before you proceed, make sure the engine has cooled down and the car has been off for at least thirty minutes. Do not remove the radiator cap (see page 226 for location). If the engine is still hot, you could seriously injure yourself. Once the car has cooled down, pop the hood and follow two simple steps:

  1. Locate your coolant reservoir, a bottle that sits close to your radiator and will be marked with the symbol of a thermostat in water. If you don’t see it, look for a hose attached to the radiator, near the radiator cap; the coolant reservoir should be on the other end of that hose.

  2. Read the Full/Low or Max/Min level indicators on the side of the reservoir.

  If your coolant level is low, it’s time to give your reservoir a refill.

  Check Your Radiator Hoses

  When you’re checking and/or adding coolant, take the opportunity to examine your three coolant hoses. A small hose connects to your coolant reservoir, a larger hose at the top of the radiator brings hot coolant from the engine into the radiator, and another large hose at the bottom of the radiator sends cooled-off coolant from the radiator back to the engine.

  You can easily reach the small hose to the reservoir and the big hose to the top of the radiator, but the bottom hose may be harder to reach and only accessible to a PCT using a lift.

  When the engine and coolant are cold, grab the hoses and squeeze them. Coolant hoses that are squishy, gummy, or cracked should be replaced.

  Coolant Leaks

  Cars lose coolant naturally with use. But if you suspect you have a leak, take your car to your PCT right away to determine the culprit. How can you tell? Coolant is a neon color—neon pink, green, orange, or blue—so look for a neon-colored fluid around the radiator or underneath the car.

  Coolant is poisonous—but that bright color and its sweet smell tend to attract kids and pets. Some coolants contain unpleasant flavoring additives to help prevent accidental poisoning, but all coolant should be kept out of reach of kids and pets. Any spills or leaks should be cleaned up with paper towels and/or kitty litter.

  How to Add Coolant to Your Car

  You don’t need any tools to add fluids under the hood. The only thing that’s nonnegotiable is the coolant (get the premixed kind, at a mix of 50/50 or 70/30 coolant to water), but you might also throw in a rag and gloves to keep things clean.

  1. Park the car on level ground and turn off the engine.

  2. Open the coolant reservoir cap and pour coolant into the bottle, stopping when you have reached the max level indicator on the side of the bottle. Take care not to spill coolant as you pour. Easy, right?

  Under Pressure

  Your engine is so hot that without a special system in place, coolant would normally boil off as soon as it came in contact with it. To prevent coolant from boiling off during normal operations, your coolant system is pressurized, increasing the coolant’s boiling temperature to above 250 degrees Fahrenheit. The radiator cap is what keeps the system under 15 pounds of pressure, so #shecanics must be extremely careful when unscrewing it. Opening a radiator cap while it is still pressurized could cause hot coolant to explode onto your face and body. The pressure drops as the coolant temperature goes down, so waiting for the engine to cool will keep you safe—and it’s generally good practice for working on anything under the hood.

  Some coolant reservoirs feature pressurized caps as well. If this is the case for your car, it is important that the engine and the coolant be cold before you open the cap. A pressurized cap will be marked with a warning.

  Motion Electric: The Electrical Systems and Computers Inside Your Car

  Early cars didn’t have electrical or computer systems. A bell was used in place of an electric horn, headlights were gas lamps, and engines were started by hand. Introduced to improve the safety of those functions, electricity eventually became a component of countless operational functions (turning on the car, diagnosing failures, controlling emissions); additional safety features (lights, horns, dashboard signals, antilock brakes); and luxury amenities (radio, heat and AC, GPS, remote starters, keyless entry). As advances in technology and engineering continue to allow additional functions, the amount of electricity used to keep it all working has increased. Now electricity is also used to run a whole slew of computers and microprocessors tucked away in all corners of our cars, monitoring and tweaking everything from air bag deployment and engine function to suspension.

  Diagnoses and repairs on electrical systems and computer modules can be complex. This chapter will focus on the major components of this system and the areas most
likely to need maintenance, repair, or replacement.

  How Batteries Work——and Why They Don’t Last Forever

  In modern cars, everything starts with the battery. The battery supplies the energy needed to get your engine running, then sustains an ever-expanding array of electrical functions and computerized features. To do this, batteries must generate a tremendous amount of electrical energy.

  No matter the size, from the teensy batteries that run our remote controls to the super-batteries that are big as a room and control computer data centers, all batteries are born, emit electricity, and eventually die. Remember the school science experiment where you turned a lemon, a piece of copper wire, and a steel nail into a battery strong enough to power an LED bulb? What the experiment demonstrates is that you need three things to supply electricity: corrosive acid (in a lemon, that’s citric acid), two dissimilar metals (steel nail and copper wire), and a device in need of electricity (LED bulb).

  Inside a manufactured battery, you’ve got two dissimilar metal plates or posts sitting in an acid bath. One plate is copper (the positive or + plate), and the other is steel (the negative or − plate). The contact between the metal and the corrosive acid causes a chemical reaction inside the battery. And when a chemical reaction happens, electrons flow. That electron flow is electricity. Connect an electricity-guzzling device to the battery, and the electrons will flow from the battery to the device, turning it on.

  Copper, steel, and acid make magic, creating the same kind of reaction that happens in household and car batteries.

  The reason batteries don’t last forever? They contain limited quantities of acid and metal. This is true of both disposable batteries (batteries for toys and remote-controlled devices) and rechargeable models (like the ones in our cars or cell phones), and it’s true of batteries of all sizes. As soon as a battery is born, a chemical reaction begins to occur. At ages one and two, the acid and metal are new, the reaction is strong, and electrons are flowing like a sink faucet turned all the way on. As the battery ages, that reaction eats up the metal and turns the acid into water (hence the reason old batteries freeze in cold weather). Once the acid and metal are all reacted, the electron flow is finished. Poof!

  For a car battery, the life span is four to seven years. For that reason, make sure you buy your battery from a place that sells a lot of them and sees a bunch of foot traffic. A battery that has been sitting on the shelf for a while won’t function as “new” when it is installed in your car.

  Your Wheels, Your $$$: The Price of Keeping the Lights On

  Electrical work is complex and generally expensive, requiring a highly skilled PCT and sometimes many hours of detective work. And it becomes even more expensive when you’re dealing with luxury cars, because they are loaded up with advanced electrical systems. The price of those repairs is another thing to consider if you’re in the market for a new car. See page 241 to make sure you’re buying a car you can afford to maintain.

  The Alternator: An Outlet for Your Car

  I don’t know about you, but when my smartphone charge gets down below 20 percent, I start changing my life plans in order to get to an electrical outlet. If you have a gas-powered engine, you don’t have to do the same with your car.

  Like a smartphone battery, a car battery is rechargeable. And just like its tinier cousin, which drains more quickly when we have lots of apps open, a car battery can be taxed by our usage patterns. Driving at night (headlights on) through the rain (windshield wipers and defrost turned on) with the radio blaring is one high-energy scenario that would drain the battery quickly. A lot of electricity is required to drive the car and power all the electronic accessories. If the car battery were the only mechanism supplying that electricity, it would drain to 0 percent in less than fifteen minutes.

  Enter the alternator, a giant electrical outlet for your battery. You plug your phone into an electrical outlet to recharge its battery. And a car battery is plugged into the alternator with a thick wire. But the alternator doesn’t just keep the battery fully charged. It also supplies all the electricity that powers the car’s electronics while the engine is running. Just as the battery is plugged into the alternator (electrical outlet), so are all the car’s electrical components.

  The alternator—your battery’s electrical outlet.

  Where does the alternator get its power?

  From the hardworking crankshaft. As we learned on page 87 of the engine chapter, the crankshaft has lots of jobs, and powering the alternator is one of them. Once the crankshaft is spinning, the engine is running, the alternator is turned on, and all electrical, electronic, and computerized functions are powered via electricity. When the engine isn’t running, the alternator is off, and the battery is no longer being charged.

  How to Avoid Shortening Your Battery Life

  Did you know your battery is working even while your car is parked? Even when the key isn’t in the ignition, the battery powers several small electronic components through parasitic draw—your car’s radio, computers, internal lights, and various other functions that continue to operate long after you’ve shut down the engine. And with the engine turned off, the alternator isn’t running, so the battery is feeding all of these functions without being recharged. Luckily none of these functions requires a lot of electrical power. But leave your lights on overnight with your engine off, and you will kill your battery dead. You’ll need a jump-start to get moving again.

  Same goes for leaving your car parked for too long. The battery will slowly lose charge, and eventually you’ll need a jump in order to regain enough charge to start.

  That’s not the end of the world, and we’ll learn how to jump-start a car on page 283. But every time we drain our batteries and jump them, we shorten their lives. We can also do this by leaving headlights, internal lights, or radios on overnight, or by ignoring electrical issues that cause excessive parasitic draw (we’ll learn more about these in a moment).

  Generally, car batteries contain enough acid and metal to last four to seven years. Excessive heat can shorten the life of a battery, so it’s worth getting your PCT to check yours if it’s hovering around the four-year mark and you’ve just gone through a particularly hot summer. Batteries don’t like to start in cold winter temperatures, either, so an older, tired battery will tend to give out just when it’s least convenient for you—in the freezing cold, when all you want to do is get in your car and set the heaters on blast. (Remember, the chemical reaction produces water. The older the battery, the more water it contains, and the higher the risk that the water will freeze in cold weather.)

  Your PCT can test your battery’s condition for you, but here are some symptoms of a weak battery:

  • Weak or dim headlights

  • Weak or dim internal lights

  • Slow start

  Follow these tips to avoid running your battery down:

  • Make sure all your internal and external lights are off when you turn off the engine.

  • Don’t leave the lights or radio on for long periods of time without the engine running.

  • Arrange for someone to run your engine once or twice a month for fifteen minutes when you don’t drive your car for a prolonged period.

  • Unplug your phone charger when your car is turned off. Even if it’s not plugged into your phone, the charger is drawing juice from the battery.

  The Starter: A Mini-Motor for Your Crankshaft

  A small but powerful electrical motor mounted to your engine, the starter (you guessed it) has starting your engine as its entire job. This component connects the battery and the engine’s crankshaft, drawing energy from the battery to begin the crankshaft’s rotation.

  How does it work? When you turn the key in the ignition, a signal is sent to the battery to send electricity to the starter motor. That electrical surge turns on the starter motor and pops out a small spinning gear. The gear catches on the crankshaft (that’s the chug-chug-chug you hear when you start the car) and sets the
entire whirligig into motion. As soon as the crankshaft is rotating, the starter motor disengages its gear, which pops back inside the starter. The engine begins to run on fuel, air, and spark as the Eat, Burn, Belch cycle commences.

  Now the starter kicks back in the off position, waiting until it’s time for you to start the car again.

  The Fuse Box: Command Central for the Electrical System

  Located under your hood, the fuse box contains fuses and switches just like the circuit breakers inside your house. Its components protect the battery’s electrical wiring from overheating caused by electrical surges, and in some fuse boxes, switches called relays help direct all that energy to its proper destination. Fuses come in all sizes and ratings, depending on the size of the wiring they’re protecting, but the most common are in the 7.5A to 40A range. The A stands for amps, which is short for amperes, a measurement of the speed at which electrical current flows. The higher the amps, the more electron flow, the more electricity, the thicker the wire. This is why battery cable wires are thick, while radio wires are thin.

  If an electrical component in your car isn’t working, your mechanic will likely check the fuses first.

  TIP: Before replacing a fuse, your PCT should come up with a diagnosis of what caused it to blow. A fuse usually blows because the wire it is protecting is faulty or an electrical component is failing. Just replacing the fuse may not prevent the problem from happening again.