Don’t Forget To Service These Essential Parts

A Heavy Responsibility

A car is one of the most important possessions we can have, not only for its effect on our daily lives but because of the responsibilities that accompany owning one. When we climb behind the steering wheel, we become responsible for the safety of everyone inside the car, as well as all the people and property in our immediate vicinity. 

As owners of a car, there are three ways that we can ensure that we are living up to these responsibilities:

• We can make safety our number one priority whenever we are driving.
• We can only permit others with the same priority to use our vehicle.
• We can ensure that the car is always running in peak condition.

Each of these three options involves a contract between you and other people — either you and your passengers; you, someone you trust, and their passengers; you, your mechanics (like those at our highly-reviewed Jerome car repair center), and all the future passengers in that car. 

Car accidents are often the culmination of numerous oversights and bits of bad luck. Because safety is most important to both you and us at Master Muffler, let’s review some of the small things that are most often overlooked.

Monitoring Fluids

It was once written that the human body is simply a bag of water — if you poke a hole in it, the water leaks out. Just as our bodies run on a system of fluids traveling up and down throughout the body in veins and arteries, our car likewise runs on fluids that travel in fuel lines and tubes. 

Likening a car’s fluids to our own blood refocuses the importance of these fluids to the operation of the vehicle. In total, your car has seven different types of fluid that it uses each time you drive:

• Engine Oil
• Braking System
• Power Steering
• Transmission
• Engine Coolant
• Differential Fluid
• Clutch Fluid

There is an eighth fluid that is important in its own right, in that it makes it easier for the driver to see out of their windows — the windshield washer liquid. However, this type of fluid isn’t integral to the car’s operation like the others. All the same, checking the levels of each regularly is critical not only to keep the car running safely but keeping the car running at all.

When serving the vehicle during car repairs, our mechanics will ensure that the lines aren’t clogged and the fluid itself isn’t dirty. We can then change out the fluid altogether or simply top it off.

Monitoring Spark Plugs

For most laypeople, spark plugs occupy that space in their understanding of being important but not really understanding why. In reality, all the work that a typical gas-fueled combustion engine does would be for not without the spark plug to give it that explosive result. 

In a typical four-stroke engine, the spark plug comes into play after the air-fuel mixture enters into the combustion chamber and is compressed in a very dense space. The plug then sparks a light into the thick gas, causing the explosion that then powers the vehicle.

When monitoring your spark plugs, remember that they should be serviced:

• Every 30,000 miles.
• If your car starts misfiring during acceleration.
• Your car shakes while it’s idle.
• The engine clicks without turning over, or there’s a delay in starting.
• You experience less power even as you step on the accelerator.
• The gas mileage drops significantly.

When it comes to the small stuff that packs the biggest punch, automotively-speaking, it doesn’t get much better than your spark plug. 

Monitoring Filters

Like your car’s fluids, your vehicle includes a number of important filters that help keep your components clean and the air breathable. In all, your car utilizes four special filters:

• Cabin filter
• Air filter
• Oil filter
• Fuel filter

Like mesh sifting out pebbles from water, your filters work the same way — straining particulates from your fuel, or oil, or air so that they don’t get ground up in any moving parts, inadvertently damaging them. If you are curious about how your filters are holding up, we make a point to check them with every tune up here at the Master Muffler car repair shop in Jerome.