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Maintaining your vehicle

Maintaining your vehicle can save you a lot of money if you do it right. There are some basic car maintenance items you can do that are pretty easy, and will keep your car running better in the long run. A basic service of a car involves changing your spark plugs, fuel filter, oil filter and air filter. Also filling your car tires. If you walk into a car parts store and ask for help finding the parts you need, you will probably be surprised at how cheap they are when you thin back to the cost of your last service. This is because mechanics generally charge about $60 or more per hour for labor and some times have a mark up on parts they buy.

Before you start.

It goes without saying that maintaining cars and vans has many inherent dangers. The two main ones are injuring yourself while doing maintenance, and mechanical failure as result of your maintenance. So you need to make yourself aware of risks, and weigh up if you have the skill and common sense to do maintenance without injuring yourself, and without making your vehicle unroadworthy.

Some things to be aware of:

Your engine bay is not a safe place for hands when the engine is running. Always perform engine maintenance with your engine shut down. If you need to start the engine to test something, make sure none of your body is inside the engine bay.

Hot engine parts burn. Perform maintenance on a cold or mildly warm engine.

Metal tools can cause sparks and arcing. Beware of this. Similarly metal jewelry can do this. Remove all rings, bracelets and long necklaces before doing any work on your car.

Long hair can catch in moving parts. Tie back your hair or wear a hair guard.

Take other precautions as required.

Tools.

You will need a number of tools to do basic car maintenance I would suggest starting with a basic tool kit which you should be able to pick up at a discount shop. You will need pliers, Phillips (cross) head and flat head screw driver, a socket wrench set, and some specialised tools such as a spark plug adapter for the socket set, sand or glass paper, grips for temporary sealing fuel lines, an oil filter grip/wrench and an oil dip bucket to catch oil as you drain it.

All of these tools and parts cost less than $100 in total.

Maintenance

Spark plugs - replacing and cleaning

Distributor cap - replacing.

Fuel filter - replacing

© 2007 - 2008 Romana S. This text is copyright. The ideas and concepts are not. Feel free to link to it, but if you want to put it on another web site ask for permission to do so in the forum. Not for release on commercial web sites or Wikipedia or Wikibooks.

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