7 Golden Rules for Doing Anything On Your Car
Eat your vegetables, Get a good night's sleep, Lift with your legs—everyone knows the rules for a happy, healthy life, and everyone ignores them from time to time. Fine with us, it's your life, but we're here to respectfully remind you of how to keep your cars happy and healthy... after all, we might want to win them from you in a race someday.
1. Don’t Force It
If there is one rule that trumps them all, this is it. Forcing something mechanical to fix it is the automotive equivalent of screaming at your spouse to make a point. You might get some movement, but it's almost certain to cause permanent damage. Pounding something into place or prying something loose is going to snap or crack the weakest link. Think of it like slamming your fingers in the car door and then trying to get them out by levering your forearm against the car door or pulling on your shoulder. Don't do it. Just open the door. Metal carries stress on its surface, so when you, for instance, try to power out a rusted-in bolt you aren't twisting the bolt out, you're actually trying to rip it apart at the point where it's locked in, often where it's contacting the top thread. The harder you try to rip it apart, the more likely you will be unsuccessful. Just open the door.
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2. Clean It
If there is one rule that trumps them all this is it... also. It helps if you think of a dirty part as being broken, and the first step in fixing it is removing the contamination. Don't even take anything apart until you pre-clean it. Dirt gets everywhere, remove as much of it as you can at every step, and all of it before you assemble anything. Even your friendly neighborhood Speedy Lube workers at least wipe off drain plugs before sticking a socket on them (or we imagine they do, we didn't really verify this). Cleaner sockets and cleaner fingernails are a pleasant benefit of working with spotless parts, but there are stronger arguments for the spic-and-span treatment, not the least of which is that you can see them better, which brings us to our next rule...
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3. Inspect It
Like that joke about the psychologist with the punchline "I can clearly see you're nuts," you can can clearly see your parts once they are clean. Even if you plan to replace them, it's illuminating to closely inspect the used ones for signs of wear or failure. In fact, wear patterns will tell you not only if an individual piece is garbage, but how assemblies are working together. Taking a good hard look can often catch problems before they bloom into catastrophes. Parts also need to be cleaned before they can be magnafluxed or dye-checked for cracks. Even modern shops aren't known for being the brightest places on earth so make sure you use additional lighting when checking items, and using magnification isn't a bad idea either. Every part has a weak spot where it's most likely to fail, and with experience, your attention will be drawn to those areas. Be suspicious, every part has to prove to you it hasn't been compromised.
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4. Measure It
Clean, undamaged parts aren't ready for reassembly just yet, they have to be measured—and that goes for new parts too. Often you can tell if something fits or not by feel alone (see rule #1) but at some point you're going to have to measure it. You'll need some specialized measuring tools for this step. Some are relatively inexpensive and simple (feeler gauges, calipers, plastigauge), while others are a little more pricey and delicate (micrometers, dial indicators, etc). You'll save yourself a lot of heartache if you measure everything before it goes together. Even things as simple as thread pitch or bolt shank length has snuck up and bit the unsuspecting technician in the butt. Don't get bit by a bolt. Measure.
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5. Test Assemble It
How can you tell if something will work correctly when it's all put together? Simple: put it together. But not for real. Not with sealant and full lubrication, and especially not with the even hint of an idea that it's for the last time. Test assembly is, in effect, measuring how all the pretty parts you measured from Rule #4 fit together. Do they clear? Do they turn? Do they do what they were designed to do? Making your car go, turn, and stop is the job of all those pieces. Think of yourself as their H.R. manager—you have to make sure every member of the team fits and can do the job you recruited them for. Sometimes you have to fire somebody, sometimes you have to send them off for sensitivity training, but in the end you'll sleep better when you know every member of the team is pulling their weight.
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6. Double Check It
If there is one rule that trumps them all... this one is in a three-way tie for first. There's no way to stress this rule enough. 'Double Check' doesn't even cover it, double check your double checks, even if you do everything in a methodical order. Even if you make a list and cross things off as you go. Even if you use some sort of mark to show that something is torqued down. Check it again. The real proof of this is that every single time you will find something you missed. Maybe self-fixing cars will follow on the heels of the self-driving ones, but even computers make mistakes. We're still smarter than computers, but we have more stuff going on in our lives than they do so we have to check our work. And don't feel bad if you found an oversight, the job of a technician isn't to put things together, it's to find problems, or as an H.R. manager might put it, "to identify issues."
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7. Take Your Time
If this rule isn't the most important it's certainly the most difficult. “But I don’t have any time!” said every person ever a little while before they had to go back and clean up the mess they made by hurrying. Just like there's no such thing as effective multitasking, there's no free lunch. Pop psychology can really help in this area. To manage expectations, it helps if you automatically multiply the amount of time you think something will take by approximately 1.75. To be more present, stay in the moment and enjoy every aspect of working on your vehicle—take time to reflect on the joy of using your hands and the beauty of your car. Realize that time is abstract construct (except on the racetrack) and if you don't take your time, your car will spend more of it in the pits than on the track.
There you have it. You can use the fun acronym DCMITDT to remember these golden rules. Did we miss any? Tell us your essentials (especially ones that start with vowels, that acronym could use some).
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