• The Logic of Liquids
• Safe and Sound All Around
• Brake Rotor Basics -- What Every Driver Should Know
• Pretend It's Someone You Love

August 2010

The Logic of Liquids

In a way, it seems somewhat absurd that a vehicle made mostly of metal is so dependent on liquids.  Metal is hard and strong.  Liquid is, well, liquid.  So the dependence of the strong on the "soft" in some ways seems a paradox.  But it's not.  Friction and heat are brutal, and without fluids, the friction and heat inside your vehicle would literally ruin it to the point it would not run.  That's why regular fluid maintenance is essential to extending the life of a car, truck or SUV.

Engine Oil:  Engine oil prevents wear and tear on your engine, which is one of, if not THE most expensive parts of the vehicle.  Oil lubricates the moving parts in your engine and keeps the friction levels to a minimum.  Several types of engine oil exist, and what type your vehicle uses depends on what the manufacturer recommends, but the bottom line is, no matter whether your vehicle uses synthetic or regular oil, that oil needs to be changed regularly. 

Transmission Oil:  Like the engine, your transmission does a ton of work, and, frankly, is often up there with an engine for how much replacement can cost.  Transmission fluid does not need to be changed as frequently as engine oil, but it does need to be changed.  If you drive in hill country or tow a trailer regularly, you'll want to change your transmission's fluid more often than normal driving requires. 

Coolant:  The coolant (sometimes referred to as "antifreeze") in your vehicle has a lot of work to do.  Its main purpose is to keep the engine from getting too hot, but it also helps keep transmission fluid cool and even plays a role in climate controls.  Depending on where a person lives, coolant needs to be swapped out from summer to winter and back again, changing the ratio of water-to-coolant in ways that accommodate high summer heat or very low winter temperatures respectively. 

Power Steering Fluid:  All that steering ease in modern vehicles doesn't come without some help.  A hydraulic pump is working to make power steering actually powerful.  However, that pump and the related components need to be kept lubricated so that they keep moving properly.  To keep your vehicle turning well, it might be your power steering pump's turn for a fluid change.

These four fluids function in important ways to keep your vehicle on the road and running well.  To make sure you are changing them as often as they need, check your owner's manual for the right service intervals.  Make sure to take note of "driving conditions" as specified in the book.  If you're not sure whether your driving routine and habits fit into the schedules described in your owners' manual, or even if you can't find your owner's manual at all, give us a call or come by and we'll be happy to help you determine what service intervals will keep your vehicle going strong.

Safe and Sound All Around

As the summer winds down and the school year approaches, schedules for many families will return to normal once again.  The chaos of school drop offs, day care, even the upcoming holidays will all play a part in our daily lives.  Much of which takes place in our vehicles.  So, just as a friendly reminder, we wanted to remind everyone of the importance of seatbelts and proper restraint for kids.

According to the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration's (NHTSA) Traffic Safety Marketing website,  "Buckling up is the single most effective thing you can do to protect yourself in a crash."¹  It's a simple thing and we've all heard it a million times, but sometimes, people get in a hurry or distracted (or maybe have just had a really big meal) and are willing to let this slide for themselves or for their passengers.  The temptation is understandable if it's just a short trip or if it was a really spectacular double cheeseburger and fries, but, no matter how tempting it may be, please don't!  Always buckle up when you drive.

The NHTSA says that "lap/shoulder seat belts, when used, reduce the risk of fatal injury to front-seat passenger car occupants by 45 percent and the risk of moderate to critical injury by 50 percent."²  Those numbers get even better for light-truck occupants.  One of the main reasons for this is that seatbelts keep people from being ejected in a crash.  Our bodies, strong and amazing as they are, just weren't made to be flung around at high speeds as a result of an automobile crash.  While nobody wants to be IN a collision, the safety research has proven pretty clearly that the human body is much better off staying inside the vehicle in the moments during and just after impact.  The NHTSA data shows that 77 percent of people ejected during a crash were killed.  And it doesn't matter whether it was a short trip or a long one.  So buckle up!

Kids and car seats are another important thing to remember when it comes to keeping safe.  Again according to the NHTSA, the youngest passengers from newborns on up to 1 year old (and at least 20 pounds) should be placed in the back seat in a rear-facing child safety seat.  When they outgrow their rear-facing seats, at or after age 1 and over 20 pounds, they can move into a forward-facing seat.  These seats should continue to be placed in the back seat of the vehicle.  Typically these seats work to roughly age 4 and around 40 pounds.  From age 4 and above 40 pounds kids can placed in booster seats (still in the back seat).  These will work until the child can wear the lap/shoulder belt properly.  Normally that is around age 8 or at a height of 4 feet, 9 inches tall.  From there they can sit in the back seat and wear the belt normally.³  Age 13 is when it becomes reasonable to allow children to move to the front seat because "children 12 and under should always ride properly restrained in a rear seat."⁴

In a nutshell, seat belts and proper child safety seats are critical when it comes to keeping people safe. But no matter how tightly buckled in we are, no matter how many air bags we have, or even how many computerized or engineering-based safety features our vehicles may have, nothing is as good as driving responsibly when it comes to saving lives. Nothing beats paying attention and following the rules for protecting ourselves and the people we love when we are on the road. We hope you will take this reminder with the spirit of friendship and community we intend, and maybe even remind your friends and family of the importance of staying safe. People will listen and appreciate that you took the time to care.

¹ http://trafficsafetymarketing.gov/bua/brochures/general/
² http://www-nrd.nhtsa.dot.gov/Pubs/811160.pdf
³ http://www.nhtsa.gov/Safety/CPS
⁴ http://www.nhtsa.gov/people/injury/airbags/airbags03/page6.html

Brake Rotor Basics -- What Every Driver Should Know

If you drive and don't do your own repairs, then you are an automotive service consumer.  Pretty obvious, we know, but as a consumer, it is important to understand as much as you can.  Understanding how things works on your vehicle not only helps you make informed buying decisions when it comes time for service and repairs, it will make you FEEL better about those decisions too.  The saying "knowledge is power" might be a little bit cliché, but that doesn't make it any less true.

One major system on your vehicle that requires service is the brakes.  The role of the brakes in stopping makes them extremely important.  One major component of a braking system is the brake rotor.

A brake rotor is a large circular disk made of metal.  Its job is to absorb and dissipate the heat of braking.  Because the process of stopping generates a tremendous amount of friction, and therefore heat, the rotors start to wear.  The degree of wear on a rotor determines whether it can do its job properly or not.  The factors involved with that determination can be broken down into three main parts:

• How thick the rotors are
• How flat they are
• How smooth they are

The first item above, the thickness of the rotor, matters because a rotor's job is to take and dissipate the heat caused by friction.  Vehicle manufacturers do a careful job of making sure the rotors on each vehicle they produce are designed and made to be the right size and thickness to absorb the energy needed to stop.  Each vehicle model has a different size and weight, so each vehicle has rotors designed to dissipate heat quick enough to prevent its rotors from getting too hot.  Over-heating in a brake system can cause lots of problems, including making it hard to stop.  But an immediate problem for a brake rotor that gets too thin is that it can't dissipate heat fast enough.  That can crack the rotor and/or cause it to develop hard spots.  This can cause additional problems like pulsing pedals, premature pad wear or noise. 

The second rotor characteristic on our list involves how flat the rotors are.  Sometimes this is confused with how smooth they are, but there is a difference.  Flatness is an element of the rotor that impacts pedal pulsing and wear.  For a rotor to be flat there can be no warping and no hard spots making high and low places due to uneven wear.  Flatness also means that the rotor is mounted correctly against the hub.  If the rotor is flat, the brake pedal will be smooth and both the brake pads and rotors will have a nice long life.  If there is warping or the rotor isn't seated or surfaced in a way that allows it to rotate properly, then the pedal won't feel like it is supposed to and the pads and rotor can wear out too fast.

The last item on our list deals with "smoothness."  Smoothness has to do with the actual surface of the rotor in a way that is almost like thinking of its "skin."  Of course rotors are metal and don't have a skin, but the surface itself, the outermost face of the rotor is where the brake pads make contact during braking.  You want your rotors to be nice and smooth.  The smoother they are the more surface-to-surface contact they have with the brake pads.  The more surface contact, the more efficient the braking.  Less heat is generated, and the pads wear out evenly.  This makes them last longer and saves premature replacement costs.  Grooves and even small metal particles or bumps reduce smoothness, making braking less efficient and frequently becoming a source of noise and excess heat. 

All of the above are factors that we consider whenever we inspect your brakes.  Of course there are other considerations too, and lots of other components that make up the braking system on a car.  But the things we've covered are important, and we feel that consumers who understand them will be more comfortable when it comes to buying brake service for their vehicles.

If you have any questions about brake rotors, or anything else involving the brakes on your car, truck or SUV, please don't hesitate to call us.  We are happy to help in any way we can.  And if your brakes don't feel or sound right, bring your vehicle in and let us have a look.

Pretend It's Someone You Love

There's a little pile of rocks on the side of a freeway off-ramp in my hometown.  It's a homemade monument that's been there for several years, ever since a road rage incident got completely out of hand.  The monument is made of three semi-flat rocks stacked one upon the next rather like a snowman, each stone roughly half the size of the one it's sitting on.

There used to be flowers left near it all the time.  For the first year there were a lot of them, so many you couldn't see the stack of rocks for all the roses, carnations and daffodils.  And the heap of them was always neatly arranged, the older bouquets meticulously removed before they could turn brown.  Someone obviously tended the small shrine nearly every day.  But that was years ago.  Now all that is left is those three small rocks.

Every time I see them I can't help thinking how pointless that was, to have lost a life to something as insanely trivial as a traffic argument.  I don't recall what the specifics were of that case, but often such tragedy begins as simply as one person cutting off the next.  Someone didn't signal, or they got too close behind.  Something irritating, maybe even illegal, but not worth paying that high a price.

Not worth a life.

I drove by that pile of rocks the other day and decided to write this article.  It's not that I think there are many people who go to that extreme, but there are a lot of times that even the nicest of us can forget to be polite.  And why tempt fate, right? So, I decided to point out something I heard once that made a lot of sense.  Basically, it went like this: we should think of the people in the cars around us as if they were someone that we love. 

• That car you don't want to let pull in front of you because you're tired and just want to get home… what if that was your mom?  Would you let her over then?

• The guy that just cut you off, would you have honked at him (or worse) if that was your best friend?

• If you knew that was your grandfather or an aging aunt in the slow car in front of you, would you whip around him or her and pass aggressively, maybe darting back in close enough that he or she knew you were annoyed?  Would you do that or would you cut Grandpa or Aunty some slack? 

I think the answer for most of us to these questions is that, at least sometimes, when we're tired or in a rush, we probably don't treat strangers like we would people that we love.  But we could, and we would, if we thought about it.

Now, I know there are some folks out there who might say they always drive courteously.  And if you are one of those, that's great.  But I would like to share an interesting statistic about aggressive driving that I took from the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration website.  They were quoting statistics from a survey about aggressive driving and getting people's opinion about safe driving threats.  One statistic went like this:

A full 98 percent of respondents said it was important that something be done to reduce speeding and unsafe driving. ¹

That's probably not surprising to anyone reading it.  Of course "a full 98 percent" of people think that.  Makes you wonder about the other two percent, right?  Because those are the ones creating the problem about which "something" must "be done" right? 

Maybe.  But I doubt it.

Anyway, the point is that, while there may be some of us who are perfect drivers, always courteous no matter what our mood, our hurry, or no matter what happened to us during the day, most of us are not.  So if you happen to be driving around sometime and you see a little stack of rocks somewhere, or you notice a small wooden cross sticking up beside the road, maybe some candles or some flowers wired to a fence, remember what really matters when we drive.  Everyone is someone that somebody loves.

¹ http://www.nhtsa.gov/people/injury/aggressive/aggproplanner/page01.htm