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[Phys-L] Car repair, making/hacking, etc.



Comments in-line below.

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James K. Deane
jim.deane@gmail.com
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From: Marty Weiss <martweiss@comcast.net>
Subject: Re: [Phys-L] Car repair



How many of you who claim it's easy to fix your car ever experienced the
days of going to the junk yard (acres and acres of old cars piled ten feet
high and arranged in row after row by make and model) and rummaging through
a hundred Chevys for a gear shift assembly, stripping it off with your tool
kit, back to the shop office to pay for it, and home to assemble it onto
your car ??... those days are long gone.


Other than the fact that you aren't often allowed to rummage around in junk
yards any more, they do the part search for you (and sometimes let you go
to the car with them to remove it). I've done that, for modern cars,
within the past ten years. Anything from trim pieces to engine brackets
and manifolds. I've helped friends gather parts to get a non-running car
running again. Transmissions, heads, engine blocks, axle shafts.



I am not backing down from what I said earlier... you younger guys have
lost the thrill of tearing a motor down and reassembling it in your own
garage, or doing a transmission yourself (with help from your friends)...
days long gone never to return.


You're just not correct here. The engines are the same on the inside as
they were 40 years ago, aside from some seriously improved engineering for
flow, efficiency, and power. You can still swap heads, polish combustion
chambers, improve the valve ports, gasket-match manifolds, machine new
valve seats, install oversized valves, install performance camshafts,
install adjustable camshaft timing sprockets (particularly useful with DOHC
engines). Head gaskets still blow and need replacing. Engine gaskets
still degrade, leak oil, and need replacing. On my last car (a '98), I
swapped in an oversized throttle body from a different model for improved
performance. The machine work you might hand off to a pro, just like you
would have 40 years ago, but all of these are things that an average
shadetree mechanic can do on modern cars.

I've done it myself. I've helped others do it. I'm part of several online
communities of people who have been helping each other for years. There
are dozens of car magazines in your local Barnes & Noble that will show you
people tricking out Civics and modern Mustangs and Camaros. Everything
from suspension upgrades for Autocrossing to engine upgrades for drag
racing.


The smell of grease and the nights when your wives or moms wouldn't let
you in the house because your jeans were dirty and your nails were black
from the grease and dirt. Yes, those were the days of drag racing your car
on the quarter mile and running down the highway like a Springsteen song.
We did that even into our twenties. Then after your race you went home and
adjusted the things that hindered your racing ability.


I keep my engines cleaner than I used to, so I don't have quite as much
gunk on me...though the Lava soap, Goop, and Orange hand cleaners are close
by the back door. Quarter mile tracks are still alive with the sound of
cars, some older, some modern. People build, test, and tune their cars.
Some people even replace whole engine computer systems with custom systems
like Megasquirt (http://www.megasquirt.info/) that you build from
schematics with a soldering iron.


A neat story here: in college we had an education methods class. The
assignment was to do some sort of project for science suitable to show a
middle or high school freshman physical science class and demonstrate it
for our own class. We all did molecules or double helices... some did more
elaborate things for physics or chemistry. Well, one of our mates forgot
the assignment. He showed up and was shocked to see he had forgotten to do
anything. So, a half hour before class he went to the parking lot and took
the alternator off his Ford. He wrapped it in a towel, quickly wrote up an
explanation of how it worked, ran that off on the xerox machine, came into
class and proceeded to explain the technicalities of a alternator. When
class was over he put the thing right back on his car and drove home.
THAT'S what I mean by doing work on your car that you can't do now.


Do I need to grab my toolbox and go take the alternator off of my '09
Toyota to prove that you certainly CAN do that now? Or take a picture of
the '98 engine block in my basement waiting for a head and accessories to
make a running engine?

If you're still not convinced that people still get their hands dirty, try
going to a Maker Faire (http://makerfaire.com/).

I get the feeling that nothing I say or refer to will change your mind, so
I'll likely post no more on the topic. Some people asked for a link to the
$30 bluetooth OBD2 interface. My interface is actually more than a decade
old, uses a serial port, and cost about three times as much. I'm planning
to pick up one of the cheap bluetooth OBD2 interfaces to see how well my
phone and tablet compare to my older www.obd-2.com interface and laptop.
Googling for "bluetooth OBD2" will obtain copious results, but one that I
see come up is here:
http://goo.gl/UfegV

Jim