Performing any kind of maintenance or repair on your own vehicle can give you a kind of pride that you wouldn’t be able to get from paying someone else, which you probably don’t even know personally, to work on your car or truck. Specially if this work is done correctly and to your own standards. Not to mention the fact that you would most likely be saving your self a good amount of cash on expensive labor. But what if its just a simple oil change? Some might not consider it cost effective and even worth the time to change their own oil. Your only costs for doing if your self would be the motor oil and the oil filter, which by the way you should definitely change the oil filter at every oil change. To me though, time is money and I don’t happen to have all the luxuries that a lube shop is blessed with, such as an expensive car lift that allows you to easily access the undercarriage of any car. It usually takes only 15 to 20 minutes for any lube shop to change out all of your lubricants and have you back on the road. I will say that I prefer the shop to do it, after buying your own oil and filters to do it your self your not really saving a bunch of money. I generally pay a little over $30 to get my oil changed, where as I almost pay the same amount when I buy 5 quarts of oil and a filter for my car.
Archive for August, 2009
Should I Change My Own Motor Oil?
Friday, August 21st, 2009Cleaning Carbon Buildup In Your Engine
Friday, August 14th, 2009Carbon build up can be an engines worst nightmare. It really starts to become a problem when fuel is not completely burned and leaves a carbon residue in the engine cylinders. This is really only an issue with older cars that have been driven more and have higher miles on them. It all really depends on the car and how you drive it sometimes. With higher performance cars and sports cars a good way to prevent this buildup is to drive at full throttle up to 80 miles per hour or so, of coarse you have to be careful when doing this and do it at a safe time and place. If you do this at least few times a week it will force all of that bad residue out through your exhaust system. So in a sense sports car and performance car owners have a justifiable reason not to baby their vehicles. However, if you’ve already got a significant amount of carbon built up in your motor this will not get all of it out. There are many products you can buy that will burn off all the extra carbon. Some of these products you can put directly into the gas tank and they will work quite well. In my experience though, using a product called Seafoam fed directly into the cylinders via the vacuum tube works best. This is slightly more difficult to do if you don’t have a general knowledge of automobiles. Despite what most people think it is also perfectly safe for you car. Don’t be alarmed when you see plumes of white smoke coming from your exhaust, this just means that the Seafoam is working by burning off all that extra junk that you DONT want in there. Seafoam is a multi purpose additive, it can be added strait into the gas tank, the crank case or fed into the cylinders via a vacuum tube.
Flipping Cars For Profit
Friday, August 7th, 2009And no I don’t mean literally, like a stunt man. This is a different kind of flipping, that involves turning profit. Flipping a car for profit simply involves buying a car and then turning around and selling it to make profit. Generally the types of cars you would want to buy (or invest in) would be ones that you could easily find cheaper than what they sell for. However, these cars tend to require repairs and maintenance to make them run again and also possible to sell for profit. If you know anything about mechanics or working on cars then this should be rather easy most of the time. You don’t have to fully restore a car to be able to flip it and make some cash, you just have to get it back to smooth or good running condition. A good place to buy these vehicles would be anywhere free first, such as Craig’s list. Craig’s list is casually strewn with cheap cars and trucks that need a little fixing up to make them almost as good as new.
Pictures are Key To Getting Your Car Sold!
Saturday, August 1st, 2009Good Pictures Will Get Your Car Ad More Views!
If you really want people to look at your vehicle, then you’re going to need lots of good pictures. Most importantly if your going to be advertising your car on an online website. People tend to be very visual when it comes to shopping; they need eye candy per say to draw them into your classified ad. Don’t be afraid to show every little detail in your ad, even the flaws if it has any. Trying to hide blemishes in your pictures will just end up discrediting you when potential buyers show up to see your vehicle in person.