Most will all be in general 3 but I’ll send them all here as an archive to look at whenever someone doesn’t want to go scrolling for one
#Car lessons archive
ornate stump
Hello everyone! Welcome to lessons in how your car works. Thinking I might make this like a daily or every other day thing where I teach you guys about parts of your car. For this first lesson I’ll go over the very basics of what your car does and how it works.
ENGINE MASTER 9000 car lesson 1
So first we need to take a car, your car can be powered by many things, electricity, gasoline, and diesel are the most common.
Electricity powers a motor which turns the wheels.
Gasoline mixes with air and creates controlled explosions inside an engine which will power the wheels.
Diesel mixes with air and under lots of pressure and heat burns inside an engine powering the wheels.
For this first lesson I’ll go over gasoline engines though as they are some of the most common.
It all starts at the engine, gasoline is mixed with air and put into the engine (I will cover the engine in depth later on) this mixture is then compressed and ignited, it will burn very very quickly pushing a piston down. This force turns what’s called a crankshaft, the crankshaft has enough momentum in it to push the piston back up after this explosion, when it does this a valve opens which allows the leftover burnt fuel mixture to escape from the cylinder. This burnt mixture is called exhaust, it will travel down a pipe to the back of the car so it is fully out of the way, more air and fuel goes into the cylinder as the piston goes back down, the piston goes up compression this mixture and it is ignited causing the entire process to repeat thousands of times a minute. There can be multiple cylinders in an engine which allows it to run more smoothly or more powerfully.
To get this force to the wheels though we have to convert the piston’s up and down movement to rotational movement. This is done by a crankshaft, the piston connects to it so when the crankshaft rotates, the piston moves up and down. So now we have the force in rotation form but we still need to get power to the wheels, we could directly connect the engine to a wheel but this would only power one wheel and would cause problems, so we use what’s called a transmission and transfer case to split this power up or change its direction.
A transmission will take in the rotation from the engine on one part of it and on another it will output the rotation, it has the ability to change how fast it is spinning though which allows us to travel at very different speeds.
After the transmission the rotational power will go to the axel, when it connects to the axel it goes through what’s called a differential (will be covered in another lesson) and then splits the power sending it to two wheels.
For all wheel drive cars, it will have a transfer case in-between the transmission and the axels. This device will take the one input power and split it in two so it can send some power to the front and some to the back of the car allowing for all 4 tires to be powered.
This is the very basics of how a car works. I’ll summarize here, air and fuel mix in the engine and explode, these explosions spin a crankshaft, this crankshaft spins a transmission, the transmission changes the speed of the spinning and sends it to a transfer case, the transfer case is spun at one end and sends the spinning out of two ends, this spinning goes to the axels which spins the tires.
NEXT LESSON: differentials, axels, and stopping
(If you have any questions or comments feel free to dm me or ask them here)
ENGINE MASTER 9000 lesson 2 differentials axels and stopping.
Hello everyone I’m glad to see you back for a second lesson! This one will be more focussed than the last so I hope you all learn something, if you have any questions feel free to dm me or ask them here.
Differentials, axels, and stopping are all pieces of the wheels. Let’s start with axels as everything is attached to them.
2 powered wheels connect to one axel, which through bearings is connected to the frame so it can spin freely, we can only take power in at one point though. So let’s imagine there is a gear on the axel, power comes out of the transmission and is sent to the axel via a driveshaft. Let’s imagine the driveshaft has a gear on it too, these two gears mesh and the power is transferred so we can now spin the axel. We can go in a straight line really well with this design but when we try and turn things get complicated. The inside tire will spin much less than the outside tire, so we have to allow for power to be sent to the wheels while keeping them able to spin at different speeds.
The job of a differential is to split the axel in two where the driveshaft comes in, by separating the two wheels they can spin at different speeds, this allows a car to comfortably turn a corner. There is a lot of complicated gearing, that I’m unable to explain over text, that allows a differential to do this, the important thing is that it allows the car to corner without breaking anything.
One of the most important parts of your car are the breaks, since in a car you primarily do 3 things, accelerate, turn, and stop. Accelerating is done by the engine, turning is done by the steering system (to be explained later), and stopping is done by your brakes.
At the end of an axel there is the wheel, but there are several other things that are right next to the wheel, suspension (covered later on), the hubs, the rotor, and the rims.
The end of an axel connects to the hub, the hub is the mounting point for the rim and rotor. A hub typically will have several bolts coming out of it called studs, on these studs you will tighten lugnuts to hold your wheels on, but these studs have another purpose, that is to hold the rotor on. A rotor is basically a metal disk that your brakes grab onto to slow the car down. Rotors are typically pretty heavy and made of thick steel like material.
Directly after the hub we have the rotor as previously mentioned. There is another part of the braking system though called the caliper. A caliper holds brake pads next to the rotor, when you press on the brakes the caliper takes that force and squeezes the rotor with the brake pads. This squeezing will slow the rotor down which slows the wheel down which slows the car down.
** **One of the most important things to help with when braking is heat, too much heat makes our brakes less effective so we want to keep them at an optimal temperature, one of the only ways we can do this is by air cooling, a rotor will have a large cutout in the middle with little fan like blades in it. These blades throw the hot air out and suck cold outside air in. There are also performance rotors which have holes drilled in them and slots cutout, this removal of material again allows more surface area which means more cooling and better braking.
Back to the caliper, the caliper has a hose attached to it which if you follow it back will take you all the way to your brake pedal. This hose is filled with a special heat resistant non-compressible fluid. This allows for you to push the brake pedal and get consistent braking pressure. if it was full of air, when you push on the brakes it would just compress the air and your brakes would be all squishy and wouldn’t do anything. Ensuring that this hose has no air in it is important to having good brakes.
The caliper will have a piston inside of it that the fluid pushes on, when it’s pushed on it will push against a brake pad which pushes against the spinning rotor. Sadly 100% efficiency isn’t possible right now so some brake pad material is lost every time you use the brakes, this is why you will occasionally need to replace the brake pads.
Back to the wheel, the wheel is directly attached to the rotor and hub so it all spins as one. The wheel serves as the connecting point to the ground, the rotor serves as the braking force, and the hub serves as the connection to the axel and power. This setup allows us to accelerate and stop with ease and reliability. The differential allows us to turn corners safely without damaging any components.
TLDR:
Axel connects 2 wheels to power, wheels need to spin separately when cornering, differential handles that. 2 wheels both need to be able to stop though, between wheel and axel there is a hub with a rotor, rotor connected to brakes and will be squished when you press the brake pedal, this slows the car down.
If you have any questions or suggestions for what you’d like to learn about, feel free to dm me or ask them here (I may respond in dms though since this chat has a 24h limit)
Next lesson: tbd
ornate stump
ENGINE MASTER 9000 car lesson 3
I’ll just type these out here now so I don’t go over the text limit haha.
This lesson will be more in depth on the workings of a standard gasoline engine.
So I have already briefly covered the process by which a gasoline engine works but I’ll cover it again here for anyone who doesn’t want to go read lesson 1.
Piston engines:
Piston engines will have 1 or more pistons in some orientation to eachother, the most common are inline engines and V engines, inline engines will have the pistons and cylinders in a line hence the name. V engines have their pistons in the shape of a V making it a bit more space efficient than an inline engine.
4 stroke:
Almost all piston car engines run on a 4 stroke cycle, this cycle being intake⬇️, compression⬆️, combustion⬇️, and exhaust⬆️. On the intake stroke the piston is moving downwards, this creates a vacuum or negative pressure difference in the cylinder, this pressure allows air and fuel to be sucked into the cylinder. This is done by the opening of a valve for the air and (nowadays) injecting the fuel directly in with the air using a fuel injector. Once the piston is at the bottom of its path the valves will close trapping this air/fuel mixture in the cylinder. The piston is now moving upwards on the compression stroke, it will compress the air fuel mixture down a lot, how much all depends on the car but just know it’s compressed down a lot. Once the piston reaches the top of the cylinder we go on to the combustion stroke. (Also known as the power stroke.) there is a device at the top of the cylinder called a spark plug, when given power it will create a spark of electricity igniting the air/fuel mixture. This mix now is rapidly expanding and burning and pushes the piston back down with a large amount of force, the piston will reach the bottom of the cylinder again and will have created plenty of inertia in the crankshaft to push itself back up again. This brings us to the last stroke in the cycle. exhaust, as the piston is about to go back up, another valve or set of valves opens at the top of the cylinder, this valve lets air escape through the exhaust pipe as the piston goes back up. This prevents pressurizing the exhaust and wasting all that power we just made.
These 4 strokes are the basis for everything in a gasoline engine. Almost everything else on an engine is to assist this process or make it happen.
One more important thing to know for next time, an engine is mostly formed from 2 large parts, the engine block, and the head.
The block will house the crankshaft and the pistons (and a bunch of other stuff but those are the important ones), the head will house the valves, spark plugs, fuel injectors, and a ton of other parts I’ll go over shortly.
TLDR: engines run on a 4 stroke cycle, intake, compression, combustion, exhaust. Each requires special timing to work properly and not blow up the engine.
Thanks again for reading, if you have any questions or comments or suggestions for what I should talk about next feel free to dm me or post them here.
See you next time
ornate stump
ornate stump
ENGINE MASTER 9000 car lesson 4
You know I was actually struggling to think of what part of a car I should talk about next. Then it hit me, one of the coolest sounds a car can make is probably a turbo or supercharger.
LESSON 4: FORCED INDUCTION
alright so the premise is simple, we need 3 things to make fire, heat, fuel, and oxygen. Heat is given by a spark plug so we can write this out of the equation for now. Fuel and oxygen (or air)
Fuel can be obtained very easily with fuel injectors, if you need more fuel simply upgrade the injectors and pump and bam you have more fuel now! Easy peasy.
Now to the actual meat of this topic, air. Oxygen is a tricky one to come by, naturally aspirated engines will suck air in when the piston goes down on the intake stroke, this amount of air is limited though because well there’s only a certain amount of oxygen you can fit into the cylinder at atmospheric pressure. There are 3 solutions to this, these being, using a gas with more oxygen per certain volume, using the exhaust gasses to pressurize the air so there is more oxygen per volume in the air, or using the engine forces to pressurize the air.
(Nitrous section had to be cut due to text restraints, see #1158800097967091752 for info on nos)
Alright now my favorite one is a turbocharger, a turbo uses the exhaust gasses to spin up a turbine which is connected to a compressor which pressurizes the air going into the engine. (The exhaust never comes into contact with the intake air.) since we have all this really hot high speed air coming out of the engine, sending it straight out the exhaust pipe into the atmosphere is such a waste of energy. So we put a little turbine in the way just how a dam works to make energy, instead of water though it’s exhaust. And it doesn’t make electricity, instead of the shaft off the turbine being connected to a generator, it is connected to another turbine, though this turbine compresses the intake air. This air can reach pretty high pressures, all depending on how it’s tuned of course, but typically anywhere from 10psi to 50psi of boost can be seen. This doesn’t come without cost though, the first issue is the air after being compressed is now really hot too and since gases expand under heat we lose all that efficiency and power because the air no longer has as much oxygen per unit of volume. So we have to cool this pressurized air down before it can go into the engine, this is done by something called an intercooler, yea really creative name there, “cooler between” as the name states this cooler is after the turbo before the intake manifold (part right before the air goes into the engine.) this intercooler works the same as a radiator, it takes the moving air being forced around the car and redirects it through a metal grate of sorts to cool all the air down to the outside temperature. The air is then thrown into the engine. Really long process right? Yea it is and this creates what’s called turbo lag, you want to go fast quickly so you slam the gas pedal to the floor, then you wait 2-3 business days for the turbo to spool up and send the air to the engine before you get power. Ok well that’s an exaggeration, the amount of lag all depends on how big the turbo is, small turbo = small lag (but small pressure) big turbo = big lag (big pressure) so it’s all a trade off.
Superchargers are the same as turbos but without the intercooler and they run off the engine instead of exhaust. This allows for near instant response times. Trade off is there is less high rpm power than a turbo.
TLDR: turbo = lots of power but takes a minute to get it. Supercharger = lots of power right away but less power at a higher rpm. Use both for most power. More oxygen plus more fuel = more vroom vroom.
I wanted to say a lot more in this lesson but discord hit me with the text limit so I’ll save it for later. If you have any questions or comments feel free to dm me or leave them here.
(Bonus section on nitrous:
Changing the gas is the easiest of all of these, N2O is the most used one also known as nitrous, so instead of an engine only having 21% of it full of oxygen it goes to 36% oxygen. This major increase in oxygen content allows for more fuel and thus more power. Simple formula i repeat, more fuel + more air = more vroom. Engines have to be specially built to handle nitrous though as it can be goofy and cause stuff to blow up. But engines have to be specially built to take any form of additional oxygen content.
End of bonus)
ornate stump
ENGINE MASTER 9000 car lessons 5
Alright this lesson is on cornering, I’m going to try and make it shorter. Please see the attached image for help visualizing.
To start here’s the explanation for the image,
O = outside
I = inside
S = start
F = finish
The yellow dotted line is the geometric line.
The red line is the racing line.
Ok with that out of the way, when trying to go fast through a corner our main objective is to make it smoother, smooth = fast. The geometric line makes a harsh 90° turn, the racing line makes that same 90° turn but over twice the distance, this is achieved by approaching on the outside and before the road starts turning we turn towards the inside, as we pass the apex of the turn we start moving back to the outside of the corner until we have fully cleared it. (When doing this on actual roads please do not cross the yellow line though, that’s dangerous and reckless. Do this same technique imagining the road ends where the yellow line is. The saying goes mayo>mustard (white line crossing is better than crossing the yellow line) cross the mustard get the ketchup. Easy to remember.) so now you know how to make a corner smooth but before you take it at the limit of your car we need to know something else important.
Understeer, oversteer, controlled sliding (power slides and drifting.)
Let’s start with understeer as it’s the most common, understeer is when the front wheels slide but the rear does not, so you turn the wheel but the car keeps going straight, this happens much more often in front wheel drive and all wheel drive cars, google your car and it’ll tell you what your car is.
Oversteer is the dangerous one, this happens a lot more often in rear wheel drive cars, this is when the rear wheels slide but the front doesn’t, or when you turn the wheel and the back of the car goes sideways.
An easy way to remember which is which is this: understeer, you see the tree when you hit it. Oversteer you don’t see the tree you hit.
Alright now for the fun part, controlled sliding. The easiest of these to do is power sliding, a power slide is just when you drift once you are past the apex of the turn. You can do this by doing the following: you approach the turn and as you approach the apex you turn slightly sharper, once you pass the apex get on the throttle and get the back end to kick out (easiest with rear wheel drive, possible with all wheel drive) bring the front of the car to point at the exit of the turn sooner than if you were driving normally. Lightly counter steer as needed (a perfect power slide shouldn’t have much counter steering.)
Ok now for the real fun stuff, drifting, to drift is pretty easy, even a front wheel drive car can do it. You want to get the car sideways and the nose pointing towards the exit of the turn before you reach the apex. You can do this many ways, the easiest is with rear wheel drive, firstly set off the rotation with the wheel, once the back tires start sliding, use the throttle to control how much the car spins, counter steer hard to keep the car going the direction you want, once you reach the exit and are no longer sliding, congrats you did it.
The next way you can drift with any car is called the Scandinavian flick, you want to have some extra room for this one. First as you approach the turn (let’s assume it’s a right turn like in the picture) you want to steer hard left, before the car slides or understeers, you want to swing the wheels back to the right and apply the brakes sharply all at the same time, get off the brakes and quickly hit the throttle to hold the drift going, warning this will throw the car sideways really well. (If you have a front wheel drive car don’t hit the throttle when drifting, once you need to straighten out then hit the throttle since it’ll pull the back of the car in-line.)
Congrats you can turn now, but fancily.
Thanks for reading! If you have any questions feel free to ask or dm me. (Sorry this wasn’t as short as I wanted)
Bonus info I didn’t have room to add in #☝▸『』general-chat-iii
You can practice in a gravel parking lot really well as it won’t break your tires, snow is also really great to practice in (empty parking lots are great for all of this) PRACTICE BEFORE DOING THIS ON ACTUAL ROADS
Especially the scandi flick, that can and will throw your car off a road if you aren’t careful
Oh yea to drift a front wheel drive car you can do what’s called a handbrake drift, this is done by setting off the rotation with the steering wheel, pulling the handbrake, and counter steering to taste. Once you’ve drifted enough get on the gas and the car with straighten out and stabilize
ornate stump
Engine master 9000 car lesson 6
Alright this will be short I promise.
Parallel parking:
I told plague I could do a lesson on parallel parking haha so here we are.
First we need to find a parking space large enough to fit our car into, about a car and a half worth of space is typically going to be enough (more is better.)
You want to pull along side the car that will be in front of you when parked, align your back tire with the rear bumper of this car. (You want to be pretty close to the car too.) next crank that wheel all the way to the right (if parking on the right, reverse for parking on the left.) now start backing up til the rear tire of the car next to you is lined up around about by your passenger window, straighten out your wheel and back up til your front tire is lined up with the rear bumper of the car now in front of you, crank the wheel back to the left and keep backing up until you are in the spot, if needed, pull forward and to the right to straighten out and make the space between you and the two cars in front and behind you even. Congrats you have parallel parked your car, you can practice in a safer way by doing this without the car behind you (you can find opportunities for this in neighborhoods more often.)
Have fun and be safe, park responsibly.
ornate stump
ENGINE MASTER 9000 car lesson 7
Tuning!
Alright welcome back, so I’ve previously talked about how a car uses air and fuel to make power, the big big important thing for this to work right is the proper mixture of air and fuel.
We are able to tune a car to use more fuel and produce more power or tune it to being more fuel efficient. Sometimes we get the best of both when tuned right. Nowadays in fuel injected systems we use a computer to tune the cars air/fuel ratio, so when we swap the exhaust to be freer flowing and add a cold air intake to make the engine breath better, we can tune it to take advantage of these new benefits, we also can tune a car once we’ve added a turbo or a supercharger so it’ll function with that new part correctly.
Cars come from the factory with a tune, just this tune is designed to get good fuel economy, designed to pass emissions regulations, and produce a reasonable amount of power. Sometimes this type of thing can be called detuning because they limit the power and function prioritizing emissions regulations. So if you are able to tune your car and get significant performance increases, your car came detuned. There’s 3 main ways we can tune an engine, we can use a dyno, or tune it on the fly, or do what’s called an email tune.
A dyno is a pretty simple machine, basically just a few large barrels that the wheels of a car will sit on, these barrels will spin with a certain resistance to measure power output, we also can measure lots of other things while doing this, making it a good and reliable way to tune a car.
On the fly tuning is done with a computer in the car while you drive, typically 2 people will do this so one can drive, this allows for accurate real world driving situations to adjust things properly.
An email tune is just when you have a tune premade for your car and the mods you are adding, these can also be really good if done right, at a point though you will need to get it tuned on a dyno if you put lots of unique mods and want the most performance out of them.
TLDR:
A car comes with a tune designed to prioritize emissions and fuel economy. Tuning a car prioritizes power (typically) if you don’t want to do any work but want more power, get a tune and you’ll see noticeable power improvements. (Warning you might not pass california emissions standards so register your car with your friend that lives in montana as that’s a place that has basically no emissions regulations and better taxes for it (montana has the highest super car and hyper car registrations.) so it’s good to do)
ornate stump
ENGINE MASTER 9000 car lesson 8
Oils and coolant and other car fluids.
Alright so this will be a quick overview of most if not all of the necessary fluids your car has and the importance of changing them regularly. Here’s a general list of all of them, I’ll go over what each does after.
Motor oil, standard engine oil.
Transmission fluid, automatic or manual transmission oil.
Radiator fluid, coolant and antifreeze.
Brake fluid, sits in brake lines.
Clutch fluid, basically brake fluid.
Turbo coolant, some turbos have a separate cooling system, it’s very rare though.
A/C oil/fluid, cold.
Windshield washer fluid, cleans your windshield, duh.
Alright starting with the most important, motor oil, an engine is sometimes called a motor btw. Your engine oil is what keeps all the parts in your engine running smoothly, to see why it’s needed so badly, take your hands, dry, and rub them together really quickly, you should feel lots of heat and maybe a bit of pain, this is because of friction, friction takes pressure and resistance and generates heat, exponential issue really because heat makes it all worse. (Most of the time.) so you want to make sure your engine has enough oil or else it’ll overheat, warp, or maybe even lock up entirely (unless it’s a Honda, those things are built to run on no oil and it’s black magic I swear.) the oil change interval is about 5000 miles for most normal cars, for Subarus it’s more like 3000 miles due to the engine layout. Not changing your oil makes it more rough because it’ll dissolve and absorb contamination in the engine, cleaning it. The oil goes right next to where combustion takes place so that’s where it’ll find most of its contaminants. Change it often or else it’ll wear out and damage your engine.
Transmission fluid: same thing as the engine but for your transmission gears. Due to not being in the presence of combustion and as high of temperature, this doesn’t need to be changed nearly as often as engine oil, it still MUST be changed though, regardless of what the owners manual says, typically 30-60k miles is the change interval depending on the transmission.
Alright and now for one of the other most important fluids in your car, the coolant, or radiator fluid. This is what keeps your car engine running at the right temperature, if you live somewhere where it doesn’t freeze, you can get away with straight water for coolant(though I don’t recommend this because of rust issues). Everywhere else you must have antifreeze which just drops the freezing point so low you never need to worry about it. This doesn’t need to be changed much, a radiator flush is recommended though every now and then, I’d recommend at least once per 100k miles on the car, it doesn’t hurt to do it much more often (especially on an older car, cause rust and stuff.)
Brake and clutch fluid, same thing different places they go. Brake fluid connects the brake pedal and brake system to the brake calipers and wheels (see lesson on axels and brakes for more details.) the most important thing with brake fluid is that it’s free of air, air in your brake lines will make the brakes squishy and not effective, same with the clutch line. Bleed the system to fix this. Brake fluid should be changed once it gets too dirty, mileage varies a ton.
Turbo coolant is just a seperate radiator system for the turbo, all same things apply. It’s also pretty rare.
A/C oil shouldn’t need to be changed, if it leaks you can refill it with the recommended stuff listed in the engine bay or owners manual (or google it.) it’s what makes your cars A/C work, I recommend having a professional take care of any ac issues though cause you can hurt yourself really bad really quickly, you can also permanently damage the ac system super easily.
Windshield washer fluid, change if it makes your windshield more dirty somehow.
That should about do it! If you have any questions feel free to ask!
buoyant citrus
Blinker fluid
modest lodge
Blinker fluid
ornate stump
Blinker fluid
Change your blinker fluid around about every million blinks
You can do this by pulling the blinker off, dumping the fluid out, going down to your local auto parts store and getting some new blinker fluid, and filling it all the way back up
If you don’t have any blinker fluid I recommend changing the bulbs as well asap
ornate stump
do we need to dump the fluid anywhere special
Into your nearest river or local water source is recommended
buoyant citrus
got it thank you
ornate stump
ENGINE MASTER 9000 car lesson 9:
Drifting: I can’t explain it over text well, so this class lesson will be a movie day.
buoyant citrus
why is there water noises when i starting drive my car
ornate stump
why is there water noises when i starting drive my car
Is it wet outside?
Or are the water sounds inside?
Since it’s probably just the radiator fluid moving around to heat your car up
ornate stump
inside yes
Yeah it’s probably just your car warming up 🙂
Might want to double check the radiator fluid tho
buoyant citrus
Might want to double check the radiator fluid tho
is that easy to check
or should i bring into a shop
ornate stump
If you open the hood there should be a big tank right next to the radiator
buoyant citrus
okay awesome
ornate stump
You know what the radiator is right?
buoyant citrus
i'll do that this week or next week
buoyant citrus
You know what the radiator is right?
Well by me i mean i'll have my dad do it
ornate stump
Yeah it’s not major but if it’s making a bunch of noise it doesn’t hurt
buoyant citrus
i just didn't want him to have to do something complicated haha