Back in February, I wrote about troubleshooting a no-start condition. It was, I thought, a useful piece that walked you down the decision tree that delineates car-won’t-crank, car-cranks-slowly, and car-cranks-quickly-but-won’t-start problems, and tells you how to test for each and which component is likely bad. However, I didn’t delve deeply enough into the issue that a weak battery and a weak starter motor can mimic one another. How do I know? Because I just got bitten by it. Here’s the deal. As I said in the no-start story, what cranks the engine is the battery, the starter, the cables con ..read more

While it may seem like the car has been unchanged for decades at this point, with only bold new shades of gray and larger screens creating selling points and “value” for would-be buyers, the fact of the matter is there has been so much innovation over the years. However, much of it is taken for granted because just about every driver on the road today has little understanding of just how far the automobile has come. To provide a little perspective, here are six parts of a car that were revolutionary when they first debuted, but are now so common that they go entirely unnoticed. Hydraulic lift ..read more

The elation of acquiring the garbage car warehouse of my dreams has since come and gone. Now, *gulp* it’s really mine. In my pre-ownership dreams, I envisioned signing the documents and then leaving the closing attorney’s office in a parade through downtown Statesville, North Carolina. In this exhaust-fume hallucination, my horde of terrible vehicles would ascend into clean and dry sh**box heaven. There, my friends and neighbors would be waiting to celebrate with a keg of Red Buffalo brew. As you may have guessed, the reality was somewhat more mundane. I bought a shopping cart and a very lar ..read more

Adam writes: Sajeev, I have a 2011 Ford Ranger Super Cab 4×4 4.0 Sport with 52,000 miles on it. I bought it in 2014 with 7000 miles, so I know its history pretty well. Recently, the power mirrors stopped working. I checked the fuse, and the 5 amp was burned out. I replaced the fuse, and the power mirror started to work again. However, when I started up the truck, I immediately heard the 5 amp fuse blow again. I checked, and it looks like the power mirrors are the only thing on the circuit, per the wiring diagram on the Internet, so I know I have to take that with a grain of salt. I decided to ..read more

Last Monday, two friends and I headed south from Ann Arbor to intersect with the solar eclipse path of totality, which cut across northwest Ohio. This was a last-minute trip so once we freed ourselves from work commitments, we only had about two hours to make the 70-mile trek. That’d be easy on a normal day, but the major highways were already clogged. Time for the backroads. Southern Michigan is so flat that the rural roads, many of which are gravel, are laid out in a grid. I figured they would be lightly traveled so we headed south on the first unpaved road we encountered. When it ended, we ..read more

There are a lot of ways to get things done when working on project cars, but few methods are as handy as leveraging heat to do work for you. Whether disassembling crusty things or creating new pieces by joining metal with the heat of an electric arc, the judicious use of heat can unlock new avenues and techniques of solving common problems faced by DIY enthusiasts everywhere. First off, let’s make something clear: We aren’t really talking about heat itself in most of these, we are talking about the powers of temperature differential. It’s that one part heated or cooled to a temperature differ ..read more

During a recent garage chat with a friend about tools, I finally talked myself into purchasing a Milwaukee M12 right-angle die grinder. It’s a great upgrade to my current shop: I really enjoy the handiness of a die grinder with Roloc discs for cleaning and the small amount of fabrication that pops up in my projects, but I am too cheap to make space or budget for the air compressor it would take to run hungry tools like a die grinder. While air tools absolutely have their place—I’ll still make trips over to a friend’s shop to do the next porting job—this little battery-powered tool has been a ..read more

I’ve made many references over the past 18 months to my back issues. It’s nothing acute—no smoking-gun bulged discs showing up on the MRI—just the usual 65-year-old-man-stuff of easily-triggered low back pain and sciatica. But it’s annoying as hell. A four-month-long stint of physical therapy to strengthen my core has helped enormously, allowing me to reach the point where I was able to do all that wrenching on the recently-purchased Nissan Armada without reinjuring myself. However, I feel like I’m always one bad decision away from a relapse, so I try not to make those bad decisions. I lift v ..read more

I never expected a rambling notion I published over a decade ago could have this much staying power. But we’re indeed talking about upgrading an analog car phone with digital guts in the year 2024, and the person behind it shares his efforts across platforms for creators (like GitHub) and enthusiasts (like his YouTube channel) with pride. Thankfully, this generosity also includes an update for Piston Slap readers! – SM Jeff writes: I have a big update for my car phone project: everything now fits inside of the original car phone, making it fully functional on its own. There are no external ad ..read more

“I think I cross-threaded it.” The voice on the other end of the phone was sullen. It belonged to a friend who had just emerged from under the hood of his 1999 Chevrolet pickup. As he was putting the #4 spark plug back into the aluminum cylinder head after performing some maintenance, the plug had bit and started threading at a slightly wrong angle. Nobody wants to deal with damaged threads, but with a little prep and know-how you can save the thread, the part, and your sanity. Threads are a critical part of the assembly of pieces we call automobiles. The spiral-incline plane that creates a b ..read more