3 Mechanic Secrets I Have to Tell You Before I Retire

here's some things you may never have thought of to make your engine last as long as possible the tire pressure in your car you might think what a tire pressure have to do with my engine lasting long well if you have consistently low tire pressure tires will sit flatter they'll get hotter because they'll be more friction from not having to correct them on the air in them the more friction there is the harder the engine has to work to spin around just like dirty oil in your engine which is more friction which is going to wear the engine out faster if your tires don't have enough air in it you're going to have extra friction going down the road it's going to strain the engine more and it will wear it out faster now the next way to make your engine last as long as it can might sound crazy too keep your air filter clean check it every once in a while you can knock the dust off even vacuum it off and when it gets dirty and you put it up to the sun and you can't see the light anymore replace your air filter and here's the main reason sure you'll get better gas mileage with a clean air filter but if your air filter is clogged then your car isn't going to have the right air fuel ratio because there's not enough air sucked into the engine and if the air fuel ratio isn't right the engine can run too hot or it can run too cool and both are actually bad for an engine if your engine is running too lean then the pistons get hotter of course they're gonna burn out faster if your engine runs too rich of course you're wasting gas but a rich engine often is dumping too much gas that gets by the piston rings and gets in the oil and contaminated oil in your engine with gasoline will wash the lubricants off of all the bearings and metal parts and your engine will wear out faster and speaking about wearing out faster you want to keep your cars cool and clean years ago you more or less had to or the vehicle would just rust and fall to pieces i was a young mechanic engines were made out of cast iron those things all rust the coolant has anti-rust inhibitors in it to keep that from happening now over time the inhibitors break down and things start to rust when i was a young mechanic you had to change your coolant like once every three years this stuff didn't last all that long but you might say hey scotty this is modern times most of the engines are made out of aluminum aluminum compensates and aluminum doesn't rust aluminum corrodes just as bad as cast iron or steel rusts and the modern coolants of course have anti-corrosion additives to keep the aluminum from corroding they wear out over time just like anything else does so you want to check on your own model car about when to change the coolant to keep the engine from wearing out some modern cars like toyotas they some of them come with a seven year 150 000 mile haute coolant that stands for hybrid organic acid technology and if you have one like that and you'll have to change the coolant once every seven years or once every 150 000 miles hey it's not that big of a deal but you want to do it when it reaches that level because aluminum has many advantages over steel and cast iron for use in engines but one big disadvantage is the stuff is much softer and so once you get impurities in the system it will corrode and it will come apart much faster than steel or cast iron because it's a much softer metal now the next way to make your engine last twice as long as don't over rev the engine don't always be driving so that the engine is spinning as fast as it can and either manually shifting the gears late or every time you take off floor it so it goes as fast as it can before it shifts into second gear the more you rev the engine the faster it's going to wear out i'm not saying you can't have fun driving your car around most modern cars you're going to speed limit that isn't going to hurt any modern car but you don't want to go zero to 85 miles an hour as fast as you possibly can you just want to do it gradually just like when you're driving around here i live in the big city of houston it makes no sense to be rubbing and going as fast as you can in the city because there's traffic jams everywhere you know to wear out the engine and the transmission by revving it up too much and that leads me into the next way to make your engine last twice as long you want to make sure the transmission is full of the right fluid and clean fluid as it wears it gets dirty there's more friction it works less efficiently and of course your gas mileage go down but that makes the engine work harder anything that creates more friction between the engine and the wheel spinning on the road is going to make the engine wear out faster and i know some of these modern cars say oh the automatic transmission fluid is lifetime yeah ask the engineers what that means i have what the engineer told me was well scotty that means that the fluid is good for the lifetime of the transmission and i'd say what's the lifetime of the transmission and i'd say like oh well the warranty is for 75 000 miles so it still is a good idea to change that fluid regularly don't listen to people that say oh it's lifetime because when the lifetime is up they're not going to give you a new transmission free you're going to pay them thousands and thousands of dollars to fix it or replace the transmission or they're going to sell you another car and say oh that one's worn out it's lifetime's over time for a new car and modern cars are so computer controlled and so interrelated that even for a mechanic like myself who's been doing it for 51 years i can get cars come in and it's very hard for me to figure out does it have an engine problem or does it have a transmission problem because they both have sensors that feed back to a computer and it can really confuse you as to where the root problem is so you don't want to get in that situation in the first place if you take care of the fluid in the transmission that'll also take care of the engine the next tip is a very important tip and it's probably one that most people don't think of you want to minimize the starting and stopping of your engine and here's why when you start up an engine that's when the most wear occurs inside an engine because the oil has to be pumped up to the top to lubricate the cams it wears the most every time you start it up as a general rule of thumb highway driving at a steady speed like 65 miles an hour and the wind's blowing cool in the engine that's the least where you're ever going to get on your engine and that's one of the main reasons that you can see guys in these big 18-wheeled diesel trucks driving on the highway and they say oh well you know they got a million miles on this truck only a few hundred thousand of those miles had been all stop and go traffic in a city i think it'd be in the junkyard by now it's because it's mainly going 65 miles on the highway where everything's running smoother you will minimize wear by minimizing the amount of times you start and stop the vehicle and this is a big reason i'm not a fan of that modern start stop technology when you come to a stop the engine turns itself off because yes over time that will wear your engine out faster there's no doubting that when you do need parts use quality parts don't use the cheapest thing you can get your hand on one real big example is a mass airflow sensor because air fuel ratio has to be perfect for a modern car and those sensors are very complex inside they're relatively expensive to create and if you get a cheap knock off one in the past i tried to save customers money by doing that and i always bit me in the rear end sometimes they didn't work at all sometimes they worked worse sometimes they worked for a few months but then when i started seriously analyzing them every time i put one on i get my fancy scan tool out and believe me hardly any of them work perfectly they all had glitches in them so if your car does need parts make sure you're getting quality ones especially if you're talking about any kind of computer sensors you want to stick to quality electronic parts when your car needs mechanical water pumps that most vehicles still have what a lot of people don't realize is these pumps have what are called weep holes okay this is the pump side this is the side that the belt dries and if you look inside here there's the weep hole it's a hole that's inside here that goes to where the bearing and the seal is that the pump spins on and this may sound crazy to you but the weep holes are designed to do exactly what they're called they can weep a little coolant because the seal that's inside that keeps the coolant from flying out is generally a rubber based seal it's on the shaft that spins if it's not lubricated and ran dry it would certainly burn out fast then the cooling would leak out and be the end of the water pump so what the weep holes do is they allow a little bit of coolant to seep through to keep the seal moist so it doesn't go bad recently dodge had to recall a bunch of their pickup trucks because they put on water pumps that didn't have weep holes now i don't know if it was just moronic engineers thinking oh we'll try making them without weep holes or whether they just built them wrong but regardless they sold a bunch of them that had no weep holes on the water pumps water pumps broken in some cases when the water pumps broke they actually called electrical fires because metal parts hit wires broke the wire started fires but regardless you're gonna have a badly overheated engine if a water pump breaks anyways which is a royal pain in a wazoo if it's your car now we're certainly dumb enough to make them without weep holes but here's something i've seen people get ripped off over the ages over and over again since these weep holes can leak a little bit they weep some dishonest mechanics will look at your car and say look at the water pump there's coolant coming out there you need a new water pump now sure if cooling's squirting out of it it's shot it's got to be replaced but they're designed to weep a little bit so if there's a little bit and you're not adding coolant and you don't see it dripping on the ground that's perfectly normal for this design i've seen people spend a whole bunch of money especially on mercedes-benz is where a water pump job can easily top a thousand dollars on many of their designs the people paid to get them changed and they didn't even need them changed because it was just the weep hole doing its normal job so you see a little bit here and there means nothing if it's pouring out sure of course replace it don't get suckered into buying a part that you don't need and here's something that normally gets ignored the simple old radiator cap now radiators hold a reasonable amount of pressure when i was younger it was a lot lower pressure because they had bigger radiators but to make cars cheaper they made the radiator smaller and increase the pressure so by pure physics they'll cool just as well a large radiator with lower pressure has a lot more places to dissipate the heat from so it doesn't need a higher pressure but a smaller radiator especially one that only has one row of coolers it needs a higher pressure in order to get rid of the heat and that cap holds that pressure in now as you can see they're simple devices there's a rubber seal there's a spring inside and many of them have this extra little plastic pop-off valve here these japanese ones if you find out this plastic part is missing has fallen off they often break just replace the radiator cap or if you see cracks on the rubber seals replace the radiator cap but really these things are so cheap if you keep your cars long every five or six years just go buy a new cap then you don't have to think about it cause the rubber seals can wear the plastic pieces can break and the springs can wear out not hold as well you know you can easily just change it yourself every once in a while and while you're at it check the neck of the radiator all radiators are plastic even this old 94 has a plastic radiator and a lot of times as they age the lip that it seals the plastic gets brittle and starts to crack and break off and if it does guess what it's time for a new radio it's easy to see those cracks and today hey after-market plastic aluminum radiators like that they don't cost much i replaced this one ages ago i paid 69 for a brand new one yeah it was made in china but they work perfectly fine and as for the cooling fans start your car up and turn the air conditioning on full blast if you have air conditioning if you don't have air conditioning let it sit in idle while you watch the temperature gauge and when the temperature gauge starts to get towards the middle you should see the fans come on in this case that one's fine and that one's fine you can feel them blowing if you do have a two fan system make sure that both fans are working correctly even though they'll work perfectly fine on one fan the car won't get hot hot hot but it will run a little bit warmer and over time it can damage your engine so let's say you got a car summer and army runs a little over halfway all of a sudden you find out it's running between half and three quarters check your fans first could just be that one of the fans is burning out and there's so many aftermarket fans available that work fine maybe your dealer fan is 500 generally you can get aftermarket ones for eighty ninety dollars that work perfectly fine and if you're a cheapskate you can even buy just motor replacements on some and you can rewire it and save even more money putting a universal fan motor on they're just electric dc motors they're simple things it's not rocket science and in modern cars above all keep clean coolant in your cooling system dirty coolant corrodes things water pump will wear out can corrode the aluminum and the engine the aluminum radiator but here's something that a lot of people don't know in a modern car if the coolant gets too dirty it can actually start conducting electricity i have had customers bring me cars some of them are like seven eight years old coolant's never been changed and they were getting a check engine light and they're getting all these crazy sensor codes and i found out that the reason all those codes were tripping because the coolant was dirty was now conducting electricity it was messing up the readings of all these electronic sensors and with the insanity of modern cars and all the lines of codes that they have if you start getting even two different sensors giving bad readings the computer tries to compensate then it can trip other codes i've seen some cars that had 40 different codes in them it all went back to really dirty coolant was the problem that was shorting things out and speaking of shorten things out one of the big things that are needed in a modern car to keep the cooling system working right is a good battery and alternator charging the battery all the electronic controls those big cooling fans they use a lot of amperage to run themselves they need a good supply of electricity if the battery's weak the alternator's weaker even something as dumb as the battery terminals are all corroded and they're getting hot because there's too much corrosion and that builds up electrical resistance so that it needs more power and it gets hot and it starts straining the electrical system weak power hey the fans might not even bow as fast they got enough power to make them spin but not make them spin as hard as they could say you find you got your car that runs fine on a highway when you're going 65 because all that air is blowing through the radiator but when you're in town it runs a lot warmer and you look and you see the fans are still blowing but you put your hand there and they don't seem to be blowing as hard as they were that could be as simple as a dirty battery terminal a weak battery or an alternator isn't charging enough any good mechanic a lot of auto parts stores too they can check your charging system in like two minutes you always want to start there with a modern car low voltage can create so many different problems and it's such a simple thing to check now realize that many of your suspension parts have rubber seals or rubber bushings in them over time these things are going to rot crack leading to really expensive repairs and that's why over the years i've used this at205 reseal it's just a clear polymer it looks just like water but it doesn't smell like water it rejuvenates rubber keeps it pliable so it doesn't crack now i've filled this old spray bottle with the at205 reseal to show you how i treat rubber suspension parts so they don't break down in the first place we'll just take off this wheel off it comes and as we look inside here's the first thing this is the boot that's on the power steering rack it keeps dirt and dust from getting inside the power steering so a few times a year get the at205 reseal spray it all over the booth that'll keep the rubber nice and supple it's a royal pain in the rear end taking all the suspension apart to replace it if it cracks so a little preventive maintenance goes a long way and on the top of the strut the same thing this is a dust shield spray it every once in a while it'll keep the rubber nice and supple so it won't crack and you can do the same here on the torsion bar right here and of course here's the cv axle you can spray the rubber boot there to keep it from cracking and hiding inside here are rubber control arm bushings you want to keep them nice and lubricated with the at205 reseal because if that control arm goes bad you got to take a lot of suspension parts to replace it they're very expensive you want to prevent that rubber from getting brittle cracking and then your suspension gets off and you have to replace them now the next tip of course is don't carry excess weight let's take an extreme example at a customer who was a scuba diver instructor and he always had big old scuba diving tanks lying in the trunk that really weighed it down and things wore out faster so don't be a slob like me and keep all this junk in your trunk be more like my wife have a trunk that's clean it's got a yoga mat and a little box with a few tools in it don't carry a lot of excess weight now crucial part of your suspension system is your power steering if you've got a car that has hydraulic power steering of course check the fluid every once in a while this is on the low mark now when it's cold and it goes up to the high mark when it warms up because it expands over time but this stuff does get dirty over time and guess what dirt does dirt is friction friction wears out parts if you have to buy uber expensive power steering pump or even worse if your power steering rack goes bad then you're gonna have to spend a small fortune so if you're like me and you keep your car for hundreds of thousands of miles 15 20 years or more it's a good idea to change your power steering fluid let's say ah once every six seven years or something it's not that big of a deal but you do need to change it because eventually it gets so dirty it turns into a cutting fluid 1400 psi pressure and the fluids dirty that actually turns the fluid into a cutting fluid that will eat through metal parts eat up hoses do all kinds of damage so do change it every once in a while and find out what kind you have some of them are red if the red turns black you know it's dirty some of them are clear they're easier to see when they get dirtier it's only has to be changed every once in a really long time just do it if you want to keep your car for as long as possible now for those of you who live up north or by salt water seashore it's a good idea to rinse the undercarriage of your car once a week to get that salt off salt is an enemy of suspension parts as an example i used to have a photographer when i did a show with cbs he lived across the street from the ocean in galveston and just the spray of the salt water coming in he didn't drive on the beach or anything his chryslers they just rotted away i looked at one of his vehicles and the thing was three and a half years old it was just rotting through everywhere he never rinsed them and of course anything that causes corrosion is going to create problems with suspension systems but salt is the absolute worst thing that you're generally going to run into on this planet so if you live in an area like that you want to rinse your car a lot if you're not going to do it yourself just take it somewhere where they drive it through and it all hoses the bottom out and gets all the stuff off the suspension system now another part that's rubber that have corrosion on it is your strut mounts this is all rubber inside here so get the reseal and pour it on the rubber the rubber is on the inside here on the edge that'll keep it from cracking the mounts themselves aren't that expensive those particular ones are like 80 something dollars a piece if you buy factory ones but you have to take the whole strut off the vehicle take it all apart put the new mount on and put it back together and if you're going to go through all that trouble you might as well always change the strut too not just the mount itself but the mounts themselves are the crucial part the whole thing sits on that if it cracks and breaks the suspension can pop right up through it you hit a bump it'll just lose control i've had cars that came here when i jacked them up in the air little things just fell off the car because the only thing holding them on was the weight of the car so when they were hitting bumps they were actually coming out of the hole it's dangerous you don't want the mounts to go bad and here's my last warning to save you thousands when things do wear out replace them with quality parts don't go on ebay and buy the cheapest struts or the cheapest wheel bearing assembly you can get your hands on i tried that in the past to save my customers money boy bit me in the rear end parts didn't last long sometimes they didn't even work in the first place because they weren't machined correctly always buy quality suspension parts when you do have to change them so if you never want to miss another one of my new car repair videos remember to ring that bell [Music] you

Channel: Scotty Kilmer

Views: 1,006,917

Rating: 4.932538 out of 5

Keywords: auto, auto repair, car, car advice, car diy, car repair, cars, diy, mechanic, scotty kilmer, engine, how to make engine run smoother, how to make engine run better, how to make engine run like new, engine running lean, how to fix a lean engine, engine problems, engine repair, life hacks, car life hacks, life hack, engine life hacks, doing this, doing this will make your engine run better, mechanic secrets, secret, engine hacks, make engine run better, 5 mechanic secrets

Id: oqMJho4RDsc

Length: 21min 38sec (1298 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 07 2020