Mountain Monkeys

posted by maggie on Apr 21

While choosing the perfect tire and wheel combination for your car or truck might seem like a complicated process, it is actually easier and typically more fun and exciting than what you might think. Of course there is also that standard population of car tire enthusiast who relish the idea of getting new tires, rims, wheels and any other accessory that can add to the uniqueness and appearance of their personal vehicle. This might sound a bit odd to those people who have never put much thought into their own tires or the purchase of them, though the numbers of tire enthusiasts continues to increase as more people become aware of the diverse selection of tires and wheels that exists out there and the overall affects they can have not only on your vehicle’s appearance but also its performance level .

In addition to the specific brand, style and size of a tire or wheel there are some great combination purchase packages that are available. This is extremely popular for consumers who know exactly what they want and are able to find it as a combination, however it also works well for people who are unsure of what they should buy. Wheel and tire packages are put together to offer the right tires with the right wheels and they can save a lot of time and energy for people who don’t know that much about tire purchasing.

There are also a number of tire styles out there and some of them are better suited to particular vehicles than others. Falken tires are generally considered to be of high performance quality and many people enjoy the way these look. The tread is sometimes unique to the brand people have reported the tires actually affect the feel of their ride. As with other aspects of life where band names count, this is also true for tires and wheels. If you want to be hip and cool, or sophisticated and dignified , there is a tire and wheel brand and combination that will be perfect for your vehicle.

posted by maggie on Apr 19

Working on cars sometimes means working through a kind of history of the automobile. At least, sometimes that’s where the path might take you. Those who’ve been working on cars for years already have a pretty good sense of how time enters into the picture. Innovations come out every year, and only a few of these ever make any kind of lasting imprint on how the rest of the industry does things. But there are some innovations, like fuel injection to replace the carburetor , that make so much sense that no manufacturer could avoid adopting it into their own machines.

It’s enormously rewarding work, and even something as simple as working on a minivan can reveal a past and a present. It might be hard to imagine that a plymouth voyager repair manual can be a history book, but it’s that as much as anything else.

Once you start getting into the work of maintaining your own vehicle, you’ll start to become aware of the history of your car. Just as the Plymouth Voyager is now a brand owned by Chrysler , there are reasons for the parts being where they are. Everything in a car has its own logic, and the parts can fit together just like the events in a history book fit together. That’s all to say, it can’t be understood in one reading, but it takes working inside of it to get the whole picture, and even then, there’s always more than meets the eye.

This is all a very good picture for those who like to see things fit together, and one of the joys of doing your own auto repair is that you get to find the connections yourself. There’s no doubt the manuals make perfect sense all on their own, and have a way of explaining things simply, but it takes applying that to the hands on the gears to get the full effect. It’s like watching history until you decide to enter into it, and then the world becomes more colorful.