Where The Rubber Literally Hits The Road

Take a look at your average sized postcard.  Not very big, is it? Now imagine four of them at the corners of something measuring about 3 × 2 metres or so. They don’t take up much of that space. However, in the typical car, this is the sort of area your tyres take up when they actually contact the road: roughly the size of a postcard. Of course, a fatter tyre will have more surface area contacting the ground – they don’t just look good.

Those of you who fell asleep in high school science class when they talked about friction had better wake up and pay attention now.  Everything to do with staying safe on the road is to do with friction.  Inside an engine or a car, friction is bad news.  It makes an engine less efficient and wears things out more quickly – which is why you need to keep up the fluids and why you should check your oil regularly. However, you need friction and lots of it with your wheels to help your tyres grip the road and to help your brakes stop the wheels spinning.

It’s not all that smart to head out onto the road to get an idea of how lack of friction and low grip affects your turning ability.  So try a simple experiment on a piece of smooth, freshly polished floor – a school corridor or a big kitchen will do.  Set up a slalom course with lots of sharp twists and turns. Also include a track segment where you have to run full speed, then stop sharply.  First of all, simulate ordinary conditions with good tyres by running this course wearing sneakers with lots of tread.  Not too hard, is it?  Next, have a go at simulating the effect of tyres with little or no tread: take your shoes off and do it in your socks.  Sue yourself for damages if you fall over or crash into a wall.  Lastly, pour water all over the floor and try again, either with the sneakers or without the sneakers.  You can probably think of some other simulations to try, such as running the course in high heels (space saver tyres), pouring oil over the floor, having one shoe with tread and one without tread, etc.  However, somebody’s probably going to complain about what you’re doing to the floor at this point.  But you get the picture.

The point of this crazy exercise is to demonstrate that if your tyres are worn or if the road is wet, you are going to lose control or not stop in time when braking. Your car might have all the safety devices in the world – traction control, EBD, lane change warnings, collision avoidance systems, rollover protection and all the rest of it – but if you’ve forgotten to check your tyre tread, all these extra bits won’t do an awful lot.

There are four golden rules to making sure that your tyres stay on the road, gripping nicely during all the manoeuvres you put it through (heck, you bought a Porsche 911 because it was fun to drive around corners, didn’t you?):

1. Check your tread depth.  The grooves should be no less than 2 mm deep. A lot of tyre shops have little cards you can use to check tread depth, but you can also make your own by playing around with a ruler, a vivid pen and a tag off a packet of sliced bread.  Do this regularly – it’s all too easy to forget to do it, but you should schedule it in.  Maybe monthly?
2. Make sure that your tyres have the correct pressure.  Each car has its own preferred pressure. You’ll find this helpfully stamped somewhere around the car – under the fuel flap, on a plate in the driver’s door or in the vehicle handbook.  This may need to be adjusted if you’re doing a lot of towing or have a heavy load to carry (or if you do a lot of high speeds – but if you’re a racing driver, you’ll have a crew that helps you in this department).  Don’t guess – use a proper gauge.  A lot of air pumps have good gauges on the hose thingummy.
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4. Rotate your tyres regularly.  Different tyres wear at different speeds depending on your drivetrain, your suspension and where the loads are in your car.  Rotating means that your tyres wear out more or less evenly and the ones that really do a lot of work will have plenty of tread.  They day that every 10,000 kms is a good schedule for rotating tyres.  Exactly how you rotate your tyres will depend (again) on your drivetrain and whether or not your spare tyre is a space-saver or a full-sized one.
5. Keep up the wheel alignments – twice a year is recommended.  This also helps the tyres to wear evenly, so you know that if you’ve got 2 mm on one part of the tyre, it’s going to be like that on all the other parts of the tyre, too.

Tyres are not something I’m ever going to neglect.  Not since the time I was in a crash that happened because the car lost traction thanks to bald tyres.  The driver wasn’t hurt and neither was I, but the car was written off.  You don’t forget a lesson like that in a hurry.

Safe and happy driving,

Megan http://credit-n.ru/offers-zaim/vashi-dengi-zaim.html

Not Just Winter Driving Tips

I was filling in some time at my local car insurance offices recently (honestly, how long does it take for them to press the button that says I want to pay quarterly rather than annually?) and thumbed through a pamphlet on winter driving tips (on display even though it’s summer right now).  Now, it’s always good to be prepared for adverse driving conditions, but it struck me as I read this pamphlet that although a lot of the suggestions were specific to winter (e.g. scraping frost off the windscreen before you start driving – a pretty obvious suggestion, I thought), a good chunk of them were pretty good advice for any time of year and any climate, as follows:

• Check your tyre tread depth. Never mind the fact that this is often a condition for getting roadworthiness certification, it’s also plain old safety.  Sure, in winter, you’re more likely to hit wet patches on the road that bad tyre tread could skid over, but we’ve had some pretty wet periods over summer, haven’t we?  Water-skiing, as far as I am concerned, is best done behind a boat on a quiet lake or harbour, not on the road. ABS and all the other driver assistance thingummies they put in car brakes these days can only do so much.
• Check your tyre pressure.  Tyres that aren’t inflated hard enough will skid more easily on dry roads (they also take longer to stop on wet ones).  Too much pressure in your tyres also increases the chances of a skid and reduces grip (as well as making the ride bouncier and the tyres more likely to blow at bad moments).  Too many of us, myself included, don’t check our tyre pressures often enough, even though we need to get it right – and it will need to vary depending on whether you’re towing a trailer or not.  Excuse me a moment while I nip away from the computer to check the tyre pressure in my Volvo…
• Have an emergency kit in your car in case you’re stuck for ages.  Their suggestion was to carry snacks, water and something warm to put on.  All those who have to Mum’s (or Dad’s) Taxi probably know about this one already, especially if you have children under the age of 10 and/or a diabetic child (who needs to carry emergency food supplies), or who live in a changeable climate that can produce sudden downpours.  Just remember to change the water periodically so it doesn’t give you dysentery.  I would also add some form of entertainment, preferably of the printed kind that can be read aloud if necessary.  If stuck for ages, you can only read the car manual so many times and manuals are useless for entertaining small children unless you rip the pages out and fold them into darts.
• Check the level of your windscreen wiper fluid.  Again, excellent advice, especially if you’ve ever been splattered by effluent from a cattle truck, which can happen at any time of year on a rural road.  The pamphlet also suggested carrying extra water to top up the wiper fluid just in case.  Don’t forget that plain water can be used as drinking water and to top up the radiator as well as the wiper fluid.
• Carry a cloth for wiping condensation off the windows.  This can strike at night or on a cold day in summer if people are sitting in the car with the windows up for ages.  The pamphlet recommended a microfibre cloth that cleans the inside of the windscreen at the same time as it removes the condensation, but anything soft and absorbent will do – even your sleeves.

Safe and happy driving, no matter what time of year it is,

Megan http://credit-n.ru/credit-card-single-tinkoff-platinum.html

Cars In Literature: Where Are They All?

Over 110 years ago (3 June 1914, to be exact), an American journalist named Stephenson Browne boldly wrote that “the motorcar, or the automobile, as one pleases, will probably take the place of the horse in fiction.” Looking back across the past century of fiction, was this prediction printed in the Boston Globe correct?

Well, the answer is probably “no”.  Fiction certainly does have some iconic cars – no doubt about that.  It’s rather hard to imagine James Bond without his Aston Martin (although, if you want to get really picky, this is not the only make he drives in either the books or the movies). It’s also hard to imagine Mr Toad without his string of unnamed motor cars (all of which have horns that go poop-poop!). But is there really a literary equivalent of, say, the Black Stallion, My Friend Flicka, Thunderhead or Black Beauty, where the life story of the car is central to the plot rather than providing the protagonist with a means of transport?

Only two or three cars seem to be literary protagonists: the completely imaginary Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and the nasty Plymouth Fury Christine of the Stephen King novel called, surprise, surprise, Christine.  Very honourable mention also has to go to Val Biro’s Gumdrop, protagonist of a series of children’s picture books about a 1926 Austin 12 that sort of does for cars what Thomas the Tank engine does for steam trains.

Usually, stories that include cars are usually more about the driver and the journey rather than the car itself. On the rare occasions where a car’s make and model is actually specified, this is usually the author’s way of letting you know something about the character who drives it.  Not that makes and models make it in all that often.

However, cars have made a few good cameos in various works of fiction.  Here’s a selection:

• In The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, a glamorous yellow Rolls-Royce (a symbol of the hedonistic Bright Society portrayed in the novel) is involved in a hit-and-run accident; as this car is easily recognised, it leads to the death of the title character.
• Dorothy Sayer’s aristocratic detective Lord Peter Wimsey is as passionate about his fast cars as he is his first editions and fine wines.  Mrs Merdle (his Daimler Twin-Six) makes a number of cameos in the various novels, including a dramatic interruption to a late-night illegal road race (a small excerpt opens our review of the Jaguar XJ8 ).
• An enchanted Ford Anglia comes to the rescue of Harry Potter and Ron Weasley on several occasions in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets – notably rescuing them from (spoiler alert) the gigantic spider Aragog.
• Fleur Beale’s Slide the Corner contains quite a lot of rally driving as a car-loving misfit finds out where he really belong.  Inflicted on teenagers as class novel to study in New Zealand classrooms, alongside an unnamed banger in a Patricia Grace short story called It Used To Be Green Once.
• (really scraping the bottom of the barrel here): numerous vehicles are mentioned by make and model in the Twilight saga, notably the VW Rabbit restored by Jacob Black and the yellow Porsche 911 stolen by Alice Cullen.  Apparently, the author’s brothers are motor enthusiasts; hence how these books get a bit more brand-specific than your average Mills & Boon.
• One of the lead characters in the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is named Ford Prefect. However, this character is a humanoid alien rather than a vehicle, more’s the pity.

But it’s still hard to find a more recognisable fictional motorist or a more beloved celebration of the addictive pleasure of driving than Wind in the Willows:

“… with a blast of wind and a whirl of sound, that make them jump for the nearest ditch, it was on them! The ‘poop-poop’ rang out with a brazen shout in their ears, they had a moment’s glimpse of an interior of glittering plate glass and rich morocco, and the magnificent motor-car, immense, breath-snatching, passionate , with its pilot tense and hugging his wheel, possessed all earth and air for the fraction of a second, flung an enveloping cloud of dust that blinded and enwrapped them utterly, and then dwindled to a speck in the far distance, changed back to a droning bee once more.”

If you have any favourite fictional cars – from books, not movies, TV shows or films – let me know the good ones!

Happy driving (and reading),

Megan http://credit-n.ru/zaymi-nalichnymi-blog-single.html

New Year Resolutions For Driving: 2015 Edition

New Year Resolutions are a bit of a cliché, really.  Most of them are made in a fit of hangover-induced repentance on January 1^st itself or are far too optimistic.  Most of them also get broken come the beginning of February, too.  However, there’s something about that fresh-looking calendar or diary that simply begs for a new beginning and new goals.  A chance to break bad habits and to acquire some good ones.  And we can all do with that every so often.   So here, for 2015, are a handful of resolutions for drivers.  Join me in adopting as many of the following as you fancy.

1. Drive more fuel-efficiently.  Ideally, this should include purchasing a new vehicle that has stop/start function for waiting at traffic lights and possibly a hybrid motor into the bargain.  However, as the family budget doesn’t permit this, I’d better drive my Volvo S70 as frugally as possibly.  This will involve not being heavy footed, finding the best revs for the situation and not idling for ages.
2. Keep up my clean driving record.  I have never had a speeding ticket or been done for driving under the influence.  I’ll admit that this actually means that I haven’t been caught, as that speedo needle seems to creep up above the limit when I’m keeping my eyes on the road ahead.  However, as the cops seem to think that every car should have cruise control and exactly the right tyres inflated to exactly the right pressure (this affects what appears on your speedo – seriously!), I’d better tighten up.  If you don’t have a clean driving record, then why not make 2015 your year for getting no speeding tickets?
3. Keep my car clean from rubbish.  I am not one of those ladies with filthy cars where you have to sweep half a dozen old magazines and a packet of chips off the passenger seat before you get in.  However, all cars that get used as Mum’s Taxi (or Dad’s Taxi) have a tendency to accumulate food wrappers, stray bits of paper, odd socks (so that’s where they all get to!), books and other debris.  I probably won’t go to the extremes of vacuuming and scenting the interior of the car on a weekly basis, but keeping it free from rubbish is pretty important.  They say that you can get better fuel economy by not carrying too heavy a load in your car, and all those sports shoes and paperbacks do add up.
4. Do more of my own car repairs and maintenance.  This is going to involve beating my other half to the job, as he loves tinkering with cars and gives me the “I’ll do that for you, darling,” routine.  However, there may come a day when I need to do something when he’s away on business and I’m going to have to do it myself.  Oil, water, wiper fluid, oil and air filters… they’re not hard to do, after all!  Passing these skills onto my teenage kids will be a sub-clause of this resolution.  Basic car maintenance is one of those skills that nobody should leave home without, like cooking and being able to do your own laundry.

That should do it.  There are no apologies for not coming up with a list of ten resolutions.  Nobody should take on a list of ten resolutions in one year, for driving or anything else.

All the best for 2015 and happy driving,

Megan http://credit-n.ru/vklady.html