Crash Course in Car tuning

I know this is a bit too soon after being told by a website that I am a mechanic, but frackly I wanted to  do this post for a long time. And this seems like a good time cuz I really really miss my car. I think I have objectophilia, I mis my car, my graphics card (i.e My whole computer for that matter), my pillow (cuz I dont have one here) and my Air Conditioner (damn its hot here). Too bvad I could nt bring any of those with me.

As you know I have shipped off to Singapore, so I had to ship off my car to ISB to my two lil brothers. So I decided to get it repaired and bring it into some presentable condition. I don’t have the ‘before’ pics (thankfully) but I do have the after pics. When my car came back from the dentor paintor my car looked and felt great but it ran like crap.

So I decided to tune it on my own, which is a pretty simple task really. I had the tools (courtesy of my father’s tool box, which he keeps very organized, and hates my touching it. Yes he and my mother have returned to karachi because of his posting, at least for an year.)

I went about my work, grabbed the ‘plug paanaa’ or the plug wrench, set about opening the spark plugs, (after removing the distributor wires of course.) when I did open them I found out that they were in a dire need of change, (as are most things in my car.). You judge the need to change by gauging the amount of oil and carbon deposited on the plugs, a little carbon and a little oil is ok, but IF you plugs are all greased up, you definitely need to change them. Because they don’t cost much, I decided to replace them, I went to Plaza, which is 30 mins walk from my home now and bought four brand new spark plugs (The bosch brand is pretty good, I ve heard) the new spark plugs meant that I did n’t need to clean my old plugs, but just to fulfill the exercise I went about cleaning them. A neat trick I learned from a mechanic was that if you change the distance between the contacts, your craped up plugs work fine for a little while more. But it is better to replace them.

I then opened the distributor cap and wires and set about cleaning the contacts on them. It is also a good practice to clean the distributor too, but since I m a newbie, I did n’t. I then checked and cleaned the air filter and cuz mine was very old I decided to change it which naturally meant another trip to plaza. upon returning I started upon reinstalling everything I had taken out of the car.

After I was done, I started the car praying that I had n’t screwed it up! and luckily I had n’t. It started and ran fine. Ok it started fine but it ran like crap. But I caught the problem by a stroke of luck. I had put the distributor wire in the incorrect order. I corrected the order and then…..

It ran like a dream. Congradulations I m a certified Grease monkey!!!

BUT DON’T TRY THIS AT HOME. I m a nut and I have a engineering degree (although in electronics, which is less nutier) to prove it!!!!