Car Parts and Accessories

Strike the arc by lightly touching the metal with the point of the carbon rod, then withdraw it slightly until you obtain an intense glow. On a 12 volt car battery the arc is extremely small and in fact the carbon pencil will be almost touching the metal. Maintain the arc and move the carbon rod in small continuous circles until metal flows from the piece of metal being welded and the car body. (more…)

Sad to say, the world is not full of people as nice as you and me. Although we have worked hard to buy and maintain our cars, there are malcontents out there who want the same thing for nothing.

Thieves come in three types: joyriders (usually young people who ‘take the car for a burn’), pilferers (who steal luggage or dash-board stereos, often without moving the car) and professionals. None of them are particularly nice but at least with the first and second type you have a chance of getting most of your car back. (more…)

The cylinder block, the main shell of the engine, is usually combined with the crankcase in one casting.

Most blocks are made of cast iron because it is fairly strong, cheap and easy to machine for mass-production. The block’s strength can be improved by alloying cast iron with other metals.

Some cylinder blocks are made of light alloys, which makes them lighter and better for conducting heat; but they are more costly.

They are also too soft to provide a working surface for the cylinder bores, and separate cast-iron liners or sleeves must be inserted into the bores. (more…)

A CAR exhaust system has two main functions. Firstly, it takes hot, waste gases from the engine to a point where they can be released into the atmosphere without danger to the occupants of the car. Secondly, it reduces the noise made when used gases are expelled by the engine. This is done by a muffler, or silencer.

The gases produced in an engine expand with great force and are released into the exhaust system under pressure. Each time the gases pass into the exhaust manifold, a shock wave is set up. With shock waves occurring at the rate of several thousand a minute, the noise from cars would be socially unacceptable if it were not moderated. (more…)

Passing on power to Auto Car Wheels

On the last stage of car journey to the road wheels, power from the car engine passes through the final drive.

This assembly has three jobs to do: it gears down the speed of the propeller shaft to the speed required by the car wheels; it allows the inner car wheel on the powered axle to turn more slowly than the outer car wheel when a car rounds a bend; and, except when the car engine is mounted across the car, it turns the drive through a right angle to drive the wheels. (more…)

Variations in the three main Wheels designs

It is not enough for a wheel to be round: it must also be strong, light, well- balanced, resilient to some forces, stiff against others, and not too expensive for a mass market.

The basic types of wheel in use today – pressed-steel discs, wheels with steel-wire spokes, and light-alloy castings–meet all these requirements, though the last two are more expensive to produce. (more…)

Spokes criss-cross to give Wire Wheel Strength

The earliest type of wheel still in production is the wire-spoke variety, a light but very strong wheel now used mostly for sports and racing cars.

All loads on the wheel are transmitted from the rib to the hub, by spokes made of steel, which are much stronger in tension than in compression.

Spokes individually have little resistance to bending stresses, so they have to be laced in a complex pattern, criss-crossing in three planes. This ensures that all the complex loads fed into a wheel are resolved into tensile loads (that is, pulling rather than pressing or bending loads), evenly distributed among an adequate number of spokes. (more…)

What the Mechanism has to do

All cars are steered by turning the front wheels in the required direction and allowing the rear wheels to follow.

There would be several disadvantages in trying to steer a car by its rear wheels, the main one being that the car would be directionally unstable.

On a bicycle, the steering is controlled directly by the handle-bars. But in a car, the driver would not be strong enough to control the front wheels if they were connected directly to the steering wheel. So the steering must include a gearbox, and sometimes power assistance, to multiply the driver’s effort. (more…)

Ackerman principle of correct Steering

Long before the advent of the car, the German inventor Rudolf Ackerman patented a device based on the principle of geometrically correct steering. He stated the principle that when a vehicle travels in a curved path, its wheels should describe circles round the same centre. A wheel which follows a markedly different path will slide to some extent; and this will cause tyre wear. (more…)

• Battery hydrometer
• Coolant hydrometer
• Drain basin
• Droplight

• Emery cloth
• Fine sandpaper

• Fire extinguisher
• Funnel
• Fuse puller
• Jack
• Jack stands

• Jumper cables
• Lug wrench

• Needle-nose pliers
• Oil filter (strap) wrench
• Putty knife

• Rubber mallet
• Screwdrivers(Phillips and standard)
• Socket wrench
• Spark plug socket
• Terminal puller

• Tire pressure gauge
• Wheel blocks

• Wire battery brush
• Wire brush
• Wire feeler gauge
• Wrench (open-ended)