Ask Joe Mechanic: Check Your Vehicle Before You Hit the Road!

It’s that time of year when many of us are thinking about or already have planned a road trip with our family to a favorite summer vacation destination.  Along with the packing list for necessary items for the trip, should be a pre-road trip checklist for your vehicle as well.  We all know that one of the worst ways to interrupt a relaxing vacation is with a broken-down vehicle.  By verifying the operational condition of a few key items on your vehicle before you depart, you can greatly decrease the likelihood of an inconvenient, and possibly expensive roadside assistance call to AAA. 

Here are a few items to check on before you hit the road:

·       Read your owner’s manual for the “how to’s” – how to properly tow a trailer, change your tires or a light bulb, jumpstarting a dead battery and more.

·       Lift the hood and verify that all fluids and belts look to be in good shape.  Top off the fluids that are low (paying extra special attention to coolant, transmission fluid and engine oil), and while you’re at it, check for fluid leaks.

·       Give your battery a once over.  Does it have clean terminals and appear to be in good working order?  If not, consider replacing it before you depart.

·       Are the tires in good shape?  Check the tread, wear and pressure.  If any of this appears questionable, take the necessary steps to replace, rotate or fill them with the needed air.

·       What about the electrical items?  Are your lights, horn and wipers working the way they’re intended?  If you’re of the knowhow to replace and/or tinker with these items yourself, then do so, if not, take them to your mechanic for replacement and repair.

·       Check the trunk.  Make sure your emergency car care kit is well stocked, your spare tire and accompanying tools are in shipshape and you readily know where your wheel key lock is, if you have a wheel lock on your vehicle.

·       What’s the deal with the GPS?  If you have an in-vehicle navigation system, be sure its mapping software has been recently updated.  If you rely on a window or dash-mounted unit, be sure you have its power cable close-at-hand.  If you use a smartphone-based GPS, consider getting a mount for the device so you can keep your hands free for driving.

·       One final note, if you’re considering a particularly long-haul trip, it might be a good idea to have your mechanic or garage give the underside of your vehicle a once over.  It’s better to be safe then sorry when it comes to axels, brakes, shocks, drive train and the other major operational items of your vehicle when your planning to put hundreds or thousands of miles on your automobile during a vacation.

Road tripping doesn’t need to be a hassle.  Taking care of your vehicle before you depart for summer vacation with these simple checklist items can definitely help reduce pre-trip jitters!  We hope you and your family have a great time traveling the highways of America as you vacation this summer!

Information for this article was sourced from AAA.com and Wikipedia.org.

Ask Joe Mechanic: Supercharging

Before I start this week’s article, I want to publicly thank Stephanie, who collaborated with me on the Meet Joe Mechanic article, for stepping in at a late time last week when for medical reasons I could not put my column together and found a suitable and timely replacement for me. I am now on the mend and am resuming my duties on a slightly limited basis.

            Supercharging in theory is very similar in what it does to turbocharging. In fact, turbocharging was originally called turbo-supercharging. The main difference between the two is where the power is created that forces the intake charge into the engine. In turbocharging, we already saw that that force was the use of the exhaust escaping the engine, which forced the intake charge into the engine. In supercharging, it is by external mechanical means, usually a belt, a chain or direct drive from the crankshaft of the engine.

            Ironically, the first effective use of supercharging had nothing at all to do with an engine. In 1860, Brothers Francis and Philander Roots of Connersville, Indiana, were exploring the means to get more air into blast furnaces for making steel and other industrial applications. Their company, Roots Blower Company, developed the first operating supercharger, which forced air into those blast furnaces.  It was that design which became the most commonly used supercharger design for many years.

           

The first use of a supercharger on a functioning engine was by Dugald Clerk in 1878 on a two-stroke engine. Gottlieb Daimler, a name well known in early automotive history, received a German patent for a supercharger on an internal combustion engine in 1885. Louis Renault, another well-known name of the Renault automotive family, received a French patent for a centrifugal supercharger in 1902.

            Ironically, the first known application of a supercharger took place in Pottstown, Pennsylvania by Lee Chadwick in 1908 and his car achieved an almost unheard of speed for that time of 100 miles per hour. The Chadwick factory still stands in Pottstown, in recent years in was home to the Bill Pollack, of Pollack Steel Company, automobile collection. That collection included a couple very rare Chadwick automobiles. The Chadwick will be a subject of a future Automotive History article, as I knew the late Bill Pollack personally and have been to his museum a number of times.

            The first production road cars with superchargers were built in 1921 by whom else, but Mercedes. The models were the 6/25/40HP and the 10/40/65HP and had Roots superchargers. They were designated “Kompressor,”, a designation that Mercedes uses to this day on all supercharged cars they build.

            Another design for a supercharger received a patent in 1878 by Heimrick Krigar of Germany. This was for a screw type supercharger, which is actually a much more efficient design, but its parts are very difficult to machine. The design utilizes two opposing screws with a 180 degree twist along their length which combines to create a full 360 degree turn. The design was so advanced for its time that it took until 1935 to be able to create the first working model by Alf Lysholm of Sweden working for Ljungstroms Angturbin AB, which became the Svenska Aeroplaten Company, which eventually became Saab. Who ironically became the first mass-produced successful turbocharged automobile and at the time the only company which produced an all turbocharged model line.

            There are two main types of superchargers, which are designated by the method of air transfer. The two types are positive displacement and dynamic compressors. Positive displacement blowers deliver an almost constant pressure increase at all engine speeds. Dynamic compressors do not build pressure at idle or low speeds; above a certain threshold speed pressure increases with engine speed. Positive displacement pumps deliver a nearly fixed volume of air per engine revolution at all speeds, minus leakage, which means its importance decreases at higher speeds.

            Positive displacement pumps are further subdivided into two groups, internal and external compression. Roots superchargers are of the external type, although the high-helix roots blowers try to have the same effectiveness as the Lysholm screw. All other superchargers have some degree of internal compression. Internal compression means that the compression of the air charge takes place inside the body of the supercharger. This is more effective and efficient than the backflow compression of the Roots type and means a smoother transition to boost than the other type. Internal compression superchargers usually have a fixed boost pressure which equals the compression pressure of the supercharger, thus back flow is zero. If the boost pressure is higher, back flow will occur, but if properly matched, they achieve a very high factor of efficiency.

Some information for this article was sourced from www.wikipedia.org.

Ask Joe Mechanic: Mecum Auction

This week, I am putting my turbocharging and supercharging series on hold again due to the significant importance of an automotive event that took place in Harrisburg this past weekend. The first Mecum Harrisburg collector car auction took place at the Harrisburg Farm Show Arena and I had the privilege of full access media credentials for the event. I attended a pre-auction event on Wednesday afternoon and evening. During this time I had a chance to talk with some of the Mecum personnel and view the vehicles that had arrived without fighting the crowd. This also gave me an opportunity took take a lot of photographs without difficulty. I will say that over the course of my time there, I took over 575 photographs.

            This was the first national and world-recognized auction company to come to the northeastern United States to hold a collector car auction. Yes, we have all attended events and auctions at Carlisle, Hershey, Atlantic City, Wildwood and others, but none of them compare to the size and quality of the vehicles that I witnessed at this event. I spent three days in Harrisburg, and I’ll tell you that if I had the money, I would have bought quite a number of vehicles. In fact, I need to retract a statement that I recently made in the Meet Joe Mechanic article. I stated that it is impossible for a car person to pick just one vehicle that he would like to have, but I could narrow it down to three or four. That is no longer true. Upon returning home and sitting down to work on this article, I wanted to pick twelve cars that I would have bought had I a seven or eight figure bank account (no decimal places), but I found that I had difficulty getting the list down to twenty.

            Those twenty vehicles I picked are featured in a special section of this week’s center glossy pages called Joe’s Picks with a short description and why I chose them. Some of these vehicles were sold, some were not, and that was only because I didn’t have money! Seriously, look through the photos and compare them with what your choices would be. I have featured about thirty or forty cars from each day, along with the price that they sold for.

Have fun and enjoy!  There is also a short article called Reflections on the First Mecum Harrisburg Auction in which I give some of my own observations.  Also featured is some information that I received in a post auction interview with a gentleman from Mecum Auctions Inc.