Driving in the rain or snow is a real problem for most drivers, so any new ways to improve vision are always welcome.

Aquapel® Glass Treatment is a product to explore if you would like to test a new way to solve the vision problem of driving in sever weather conditions. The product is developed and patented for pro application on all automobile windows:

• windshields,
• side windows,
• rear windows,
• glass shower doors

In addition to improved vision you are guaranteed a long lasting effect. Weeks and even months of normal use in bad rain and snow, car washing and glass cleaning.

The technology comes from aviation that makes it quite credible. To describe the technology in two words: you apply the substance to the windows and it makes water bead and easily shed off your glass. As a result driver sees the road much better, roads are safer…

As I have mentioned the technology is not purely automobile focused, it is widely applied in marine, aviation and even household life.

The manufacturer lists the windshield rain repellent product advantages in this way:

• Repels rain for remarkably improved vision
• Makes it easier to clear ice, snow and even dirt
• Reduces glare in the rain, especially at night
• Helps reduce water marks and keeps down salt water

If you would like to learn more about the product, find an Aquapel® dealer close to your place or would like to become the product dealer make sure to check Aquapel® website.

Do you run an insured car? I bet you do. And if you drive a van? I think it does not matter what you drive – car insurance is like gas – you can’t drive the car if it is out of gas, so you can’t drive a car if it is not insured.

Internet is a great source of information – and it is not just news and celebrity gossip to check. You can buy stuff online cheap or you can save money by comparing a lot of service providers.

Let’s look at our sample of van insurance companies. When you go to QuoteZone insurance you can compare up to 15 top national van insurance offers including offers from direct insurers and brokers. No doubt, armed with that sort of information you are guaranteed to find the best deal for van insurance.

Once you are through with your van insurance look around – you can shop here for more deals:

-    car insurance
-    life insurance
-    home insurance
-    etc…

You get that information nicely presented and updated at one website for free. And if I see that it is a nicely designed, visitor friendly, updated and reliable source of valuable information – insurance, shopping, whatever – I always tend to bookmark it to be sure to come back and get info when I need it again - in a few months or years.

Or you can look at this in the way QuoteZone does it:

The Old Way

Spend hours searching for insurance websites and filling in tedious insurance quote forms.

The QuoteZone Way

Fill in one simple form and get competitive quotes from cheap uk insurance brokers and companies.

I just want you to notice that here we talk about a UK website though there are similar services here in the US.

The production of bio fuel can lead to significant acceleration of the climate change. As the result of cultivating corns, rape or pal, oil the amount of produced greenhouse gas is more than it is economized by using the bio fuel. These were the results of the research published in specialized magazines Science and Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics.

In order to produce bio fuel the humanity cuts down rain forests and transform the released lands into agricultural areas. And as the result of burning off rainforest in Indonesia, the amount of extracted CO2 is 400 more than the amount it could be reduced by in case those areas were used for growing palm oil, writes Mr. Fargione a member of the environmental organization The Nature Conservancy. Brazilian rainforests transformed into soya plantations extract 300 times more CO2 then it is possible to reduce by using bio fuel for a whole year.

Moreover, according to the data received by the Nobel laureate in chemistry Pole Krutzen, manure extracts much more dangerous greenhouse gas – nitrous oxide than it was considered to extract before. The scholar believes that environment-friendly are only those kinds of bio fuel that are made on base of waste material from agricultural and forest industries or herbs with insignificant addition of manure.

Professor Krutzen says:

“I’m not an absolute opponent of bio fuel, I’m only against the ways it is used today.”

The professor demands in-detail and critical description of all the greenhouse gases extracted in the production of each type of bio fuel.

The politicians and scientists lay huge expectations on the bio fuel of the second generation which is totally Nature-friendly. All parts of plants (and thus all the waste materials) can be used for the production of this bio fuel of the new generation. Firstly, timber is processed into a gas using Btl-technology (Biomass to Liquid) and then it is processed into ethanol.

Passive Safety Equipment Issues: New EuroNCAP Tests

With the modern phenomena like globalization and development of transcontinental companies, the world is entering the new era of its evolution – post-industrial society (in this very sense it is contrasted to the industrial one). What do I mean and what does it have to do with car and automotive parts? The answer is simple, but it comes in form of a question: what percentage of US cars is actually build here, in the States?

It is much cheaper to produce parts in offshore plants and factories (for instance, Mexico, Africa, South America etc.) If the major part of a car is made outside the US can such a car be called American?

To answer all these questions I decided to conduct a kind of research to find out what percentage of car parts are made inside the US. You won’t believe the information I found!

I learned that to find out what parts are made in the States and what are made offshore one can read in small writing on the window sticker of a new car dealership. But that is now the answer to the question, it is more like a means of arriving at the correct answer
Let’s take for instance GM. Car of this company are made all over the world. Most of the newer body styles are based on global platforms. Pontiac GTO is based on another GM car built in Australia. Chevrolet pickups are made in Canada and Mexico. At the same time GM has manes like Vauxhall in Europe and Holden in Australia. Under these names the cars are sold there.

Nowadays most “Japanese” cars sold in the US are built here. Volkswagens are supposed to be German but are built in Mexico.

The approximate percentage of US parts for the companies are:

• GMC – 79%
• Ford – 84%
• Dodge – 90%

But these data is too approximate to believe it blindly.

Back to GM. The company is one of the few American cars that are still out there. All models are designed in the US. But some, about 20-25% use foreign motors. Also it’s cheaper to build outside of the country, so about 80-90% are built in foreign locations.

So what conclusion can we arrive at? Mine is the following: no matter where cars are made, until they are sold under domestic flags and the money stays in the budget, they are American. Do you agree with me?

Here is a Simple Way to Learn A Lot about a Person by the Car he Drives. Part 2

Today I want to discuss another oil issue. Imagine the situation like this. It is time to change to oil and you take your car to the auto service. The next day you get the car back and drive it for a year.

A year later you wake up with some strange feeling and go to read the user’s manual of your car. You find out it was filled with synthetic oil when sold, but at the service station they’ve poured a regular one. It looks like you’ve been diving with the wrong oil for a year! You call the dealership of the car manufacturer and ask whether the change of the oil type might affect the car’s performance, and they say it can. Then you call the auto service and they claim that it doesn’t matter. Who’s right in this case?

In fact, the change of the oil is not likely to cause much damage in a year, but in the long run it might affect the wear rate of the engine components. 1 year is such small a period to ruin the engine completely, so I would say that there is nothing to worry about with the engine.

Yet, there is one thing to worry about – the auto service. To tell you the truth, the idea of the professionals doing their job actually clashes with the common sense when such things happen.

If they are the change oil in an Audi, they have to consult the Audi’s recommendations, if it is GM, then – GM’s. Unless they do their job properly they shouldn’t be trusted. Oil change must be done according to car manufacturer’s recommendations, but not to what they feel like doing.

Moreover, such a dramatic mistake can affect the car warranty. If the car was designed to run on synthetic oil it should be synthetic and not any other type of oil.

At the same time the question about the service station remains open. If the type of the oil is not specified the general practice is to replace it with regular mineral oil. And it might be your own error that you hadn’t specified the oil type before giving the car to the experts.

So, what is the major conclusion we can arrive at from the situation? When you need to change oil, go only to a reliable service center and always specify the type of oil your car is designed to run on.

Preventing Tire Rack: Does Underinflation Affect the Performance?

It is a common knowledge that the carrying capacity of tires directly depend on the size and the air pressure. Bigger tires and higher air pressures allow more load capacity than the smaller and less inflated ones.

A properly inflated tire it more resistible to wear as the weight of the load is distributed evenly through the surface of the tire. At the same time people seldom realize that an underinflated tire has a different reaction on driver’s actions that the correctly inflated one.

Once an experiment was conducted to test the performance of an underinflated and normally inflated tires. The tires used in the experiment were Goodyear Eagle GT-HR High Performance All-Season radials.

One of the tested cars was wearing the properly inflated tires (the manufacture recommends 29psi front and 33 psi rear). The second car was wearing 30% lower inflated tires (20 psi front and 23 psi rear). This 30% was chosen deliberately as it is the lowest pressure which is not warned about by passive pressure monitoring systems.

The first part of the test was a visual identification of the underinflated tires. With the modern low-profile tires it turned out to be quite a complicated task and it revealed one important conclusion: eyes cannot be used as reliable tire pressure gauges.

The second part of the test was the performance test. A number of drivers tested the properly inflated and underinflated tires. And everyone participating in the test agreed that while the behavior of correctly inflated tires was predictable and the car responded well, the car with underinflated tires responded slower (with the front tires being slightly faster than the rear ones).

The underinflated tires delivered acceptable performance when the car was on straight sections, but when it came to passing turns, the car was a little slower than the proper version. The test showed 7% of speed loss for underinflated tires.

To cut the long story short, if a manufacturer wanted to add some additional spice to its new tires, if underinflated, all the effects are lost completely.

So, we arrive at the only possible conclusion: if you want the performance of your tires to be the most effective and adequate, you need to follow the instructions given in the owner’s manual. Moreover, you need to check the tire inflation at least once a month.

Preventing Tire Rack: How to Measure Tire wear with US Coins

Car parts are not eternal all of them need replacing sooner or later. Today I want to talk to you about tires. How can one learn that his/her tires need replacement? Well, there are various ways to get to know that fact, but I would like to give you the most practical one. Here is the way which is used by thousands of auto owners across the US.

Measuring a tire tread depth gauge with American coins.

1. Insert a penny into a number of grooves across the tire. If you see that a part of Lincoln’s head is lower than the higher part of the thread it means that you still have 2/32” of the thread depth in possession.

2. Insert a quarter into several grooves across the tire. If you see that part of Washington’s hear is lower than the higher part of the thread, you still have 4/32” of the thread depth in possession

3. Insert a penny in thread grooves across the tire. If you see that the top of the Lincoln Memorial is lower than the top of the thread you still have 6/32” of the thread in possession.

Once you are done with the first location of the tire you need to measure the depth of the threads across the entire tire. In order to do it measure the depths in the middle of the tire as well as on its sides. This helps to determine the unevenness of the wear and some other aspects as mechanical damages etc.

In the overwhelming majority of states the law prohibits driving on a tire as the wear reaches 2/32” of the thread depth. Practically all the modern tires are equipped with wear indicators (so-called “wear bars”). These are the marks that are build into the tire with the goal of showing the driver when the tire is no longer legally usable.

Nevertheless, the law regulations aren’t always the best. The mark the crucial point when the tire cannot be used any longer on a dry surface. As for the wet surfaces, at 2/32” of the remaining thread depth the tire cannot resist hydroplaning and its traction on snow is close to zero.

In fact, even when the wear reaches 4/32” of the thread depth you should consider changing tires. You need to realize that all the negative effects of a wet road are eliminated by removing water via the threads from the surface of the tire. When the threads are not deep enough to perform their direct functions, the tire becomes uncontrollable.

As for snow-covered surfaces, the proper time to replace the tires is when the wear reaches 6/32” of the threads depth. When you are driving on the snow the tires need to have sufficient thread depth to remove snow as they roll. That’s why some winter tires have “wear bars” at 6/32” of threads depth.

Advanced Auto Parts Replacement: What to Do with the Clutch?

The other day a friend of mine popped in for a chart. I had delicious biscuits and we had tea and the conversation went well, but let’s get down to the point I wanted to tell you about. He told me about clutch problem in his car. He said something like that:

“You know, Nick, my car’s not grabbing any more when I try to accelerate. I have to start up very slow and accelerate extremely slowly. My clutch is slipping for sure as the rpm goes up.”

He wanted to know if he could do anything to the clutch (he suggested changing some fluids or whatever) besides replacing it with a new one as at the moment he didn’t have much money to spend on the purpose. He also wondered if there are any online magazines where ho could buy good and cheap parts.

First of all, I asked him about the type of transmission in his car. It really matters whether he’s having a manual or automatic. If it is a standard manual transmission, he might be able to get it repaired (though very unlikely). The only thing that came to my mind was readjusting where the clutch plate catches (engages/disengages). In fact, the conclusion I arrived at from the very beginning of his story is that he will have to spend money on a new transmission.

After all, my worst expectations fulfilled. Hearing all the details and symptoms of his car disease I arrived at the conclusion that there is no other way but replacing the clutch.

He also wanted to know if I knew some online shops that could help him get great deals and bargains.

Of course I DID know them. The stores I recommended were:

• www.autopartswarehouse.com
• www.rockauto.com
• overstock.com

I personally used the services of these stores so I can guarantee that those stores are reliable. The first store though seems the perfect choice. They have quality products and service. Moreover, they also have discounts offers and you are likely to find there the car parts you need. Two or three times I bought the stuff for my car there and, so I recommended the site to my friend.

The last thing I would like to stop on (as I did in the conversation with my friend) is that preventing failures of car systems is easier and cheaper than their repairs. He decided that he needed something done to his clutch too late to help it. If he noticed it earlier he could have gone without having to replace the part.

Tribal Flame Designs Right from your Tailpipe

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Where can I find replacement bolts for my car?

One might wonder where to get a few replacement bolts for a car! In fact, the question seems so childish…Well, in an old drawer where all your other replacement bolts are! Ok…so simple, but what it there is no old drawer, toolbox, cabinet with parts? Of course, there are always local service shops around. But believe me, not all of them will supply you with the required bolt. This becomes even more evident with rare cars or cars of foreign origin.

In this case you have to work out another solution! What can it be. I’ve thought for a while and came up with a few ones:

1. The first solution that comes to my mind is the local junk yard. You can put on some old clothes and take a hammer and a screwdriver and visit one. There you can make an attempt to pick up a few bolts of the similar size and shape. Moreover, you might find there other parts from your car. And that will be absolutely free. To my mind that factors is the major advantage of the below described solution to car parts problem.

2. There are many online shops that offer dirt-cheap parts from junk-yard cars. Some of them even ship the parts. You can visit the following sites:

• junkyarddog.com
• car-part.com
• uneedapart.com

3. Another option is going to your local bolt supply house. If you don’t know where it is located look through the yellow pages. As a matter of fact practically all the cities have ones.

4. You can contact the dealer who sells the kind of a car you have. He will probably have a service dept that may be able to get them

5. Run an online search (via Google or Yahho!, for instance). You are likely to find the sites like www.aaronsmachinescrews.com/MachineScr…, http://www.fastenersuperstore.com or similar ones.

So no matter what you are looking for, your sensibility can lead you further than you can imagine.

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