The car industry has linked buying new cars, which are undoubtedly more fuel efficient, to saving fuel and being 'greener'. But for most people the concept of spending $20,000+ to start saving money on fuel is, frankly, ridiculous.
Yet there is plenty that ordinary motorists can do to save money on fuel, emit less CO2 and generally consume less - which will be increasingly important to
This post is about how to tighten wheel nuts on cars. The humble wheel nut (also called a ‘lug nut’) is more complext than you might think.
How hard can this nuts and bolts stuff - and in particular, tightening them up - really be? The answer is: ‘plenty’. And getting it wrong has consequences - bad ones. So here's how to tighten wheel nuts properly.
Tightening your wheel nuts incorrectly after replacing a wheel can warp the bake disc, leading to uneven wear and a condition known as DTV: ‘disc thickness variation’. This is where the clamping force on the disc is uneven, leading to uneven wear, and a brake pedal that pulsates annoyingly underfoot because the disc is warped
Simple punctures through the tread face can be repaired in the boonies - without even having to remove the wheel from the vehicle. You'll need a tyre plug kit for the temporary repair ... and of course a plug-in 12-volt air compressor (because it's not much good fixing the tyre if it's still flat. Even though it's only flat on the bottom, right?
Read MoreSafe handling and storage of petrol (gasoline)
Petrol deserves respect – and not just because it’s running out. Last month we went over the awesome destructive power the stuff. There are regulations about how you must store petrol, but it remains easy to catalyze disaster using perfectly legal quantities of petrol. (It’s why they’re suddenly so twitchy about passengers carrying liquids onto international aircraft.)
Click here for the full story on static electricity as a fuel fire hazard.
Here’s how not to dice with death using petrol.
One barrel of crude oil – 159 litres – represents the same ability to do physical work as 12 big, strapping slaves toiling 40 hours per week, for a year. It is, literally, 25,000 slave-hours, gift-wrapped. You can whip it out of the ground in Iraq for about $1.50 and sell it on the open market for a 5000 per cent mark-up without falling afoul of the human-rights regulators. And you can do it about 1000 times a second, 24/7. It’s a business with real
