There are a lot of engine maintenance shops around Jacksonville, FL, and for good reason: regular and major tune-ups can improve your car's performance, prolong its lifespan, and significantly improve fuel efficiency.  With fuel prices not showing any sign of declining in the foreseeable future, keeping up on your engine maintenance is just a wise long-term investment.

Major tune-ups done by your dealer can be pretty pricey; it's generally a better idea to get to know a local mechanic with his own smaller garage -- Jacksonville, FL has them by the hundreds.  Alternately, if you're good with your hands, you can get to know the inside of your car and do basic tune-ups and engine maintenance yourself. 

Here are some basic things you should learn about your car:

Ignition/Electrical

Check your battery every season.  Clean any corrosion off of the cable clamps and terminals (baking soda and a small wire brush work well).  If the levels are low, add some distilled water to top them off.  Both of these steps help to extend your battery life.

Every 35,000 miles -- about every three years for most people -- replace your spark plugs.  (Platinum plugs you can do every five years instead.)  Look them over for corrosion or cracks, and replace them if they get damaged.  If you're doing a major tune-up, get new high-quality cables for your spark plugs as well.

Speaking of spark-plug cables, every major tune-up should also replace your distributor cap and the rotor of your distributor, if it has one.  If your car is more than twenty years old, you'll also need to replace the contact points and the condenser. 

Oil and Fuel

Assuming your car has non-hydraulic valves, you'll need to adjust the valve covers and replace the valve cover gaskets.  If you have one, inspect your timing belt and adjust or replace it if need be.  Check the fan belt and all other belts, replacing any that are cracked or frazzled. 

Every three years -- whenever you replace your spark plugs -- you should also replace your fuel filter.  If you have fuel injection, clean your fuel injector at the same time.  Once a year, replace your air filter as well.

Knowing what should be done and when will help keep your car running in tip-top shape for as long as possible, and if you can do it yourself, you can save yourself some money as well.  If you don't feel comfortable doing all of this yourself, there are still hundreds of small shops in the Jacksonville, FL area that will be happy to do all of your engine maintenance for you. 

Walking in to one of the many Jacksonville, FL auto repair shops and asking for an estimate on brake replacement should be easy, right?  They're just brakes, after all. 

What you might not realize is that your car's brakes are actually a complex system of parts.  Fluid, hoses, calipers, drums, cylinders, pads, rotors, pistons, and of course the wheel all play a vital part in making sure that your two-ton steel death machine stops before it hits the neighbor's dog. 

The cost of brake replacement varies a lot depending on which of those parts need to be replaced.  Some of them can run a few hundred dollars, or if a few are broken at once, it could cost a couple of thousand dollars.

If you're mechanically-minded and good with your hands, it is possible to change brake pads yourself.  Just get the proper tools from your local auto parts store, make sure your vehicle is nice and cooled down (brakes stay hot for a long time even after you're done driving), and jack it up.  Take the wheel off, remove the brake caliper bolts, squeeze the brake piston back to make room for the new brake pad, and slip it in.  It's easier said than done, but it's not that hard to do.

Most often, of course, the brake replacement consists of new pads and little else.  Brake pads are designed to wear down over time, so replacing them is just basic maintenance.  Brake pads have wear indicators -- tiny metal tabs that are designed to squeal when you step on the breaks if they're wearing low.  If you hear squealing when you step on the brakes, it's time for a brake replacement.  Ignore it, and soon you'll hear grinding -- that means that the pad has entirely worn down, and you're seriously damaging your brakes.

If that's already happened, you're looking at a tidy sum to get some more critical parts like the rotor or the drum replaced -- likely both.  There are other reasons that brakes might stop working as well, however.

If you get air into a pneumatic brake line, for example, brakes can respond differently.  Unlike pneumatic fluid, air will compress when squeezed, which can slow down your brakes' response time and it can reduce the effectiveness of the brake as well.  On the chaotic streets of Jacksonville, FL, that kind of delay and inefficiency can spell disaster.  A similar effect can happen if your brake fluid is low, so before you assume the worst, find your brake fluid reservoir and check the levels.  If they're low, just fill them back up with the proper kind of brake fluid.

Brake replacement shouldn't be your first thought if your brakes start to lose performance -- but it should always be something you're ready do have done, because the other option is an unstoppable recipe for disaster. 

So your car has started pulling or drifting to one side, and you're wondering: are these going to require alignment changes, or are they just tire problems?  Start by looking at your tires: if they're showing uneven wear, it's pretty likely that there's a tire that's pulling.  Unfortunately, it's not all that simple.  A tire can look perfectly fine and still cause a bit of a pull, especially at low speeds.  But if the tires do look OK and it's still pulling when you're at highway speeds, you should definitely get the alignment checked.

In all likelihood, you have radial tires on your car. Radial tires are specially designed to grab the road, and if the steel belts are even slightly off, they can grip unevenly.  Sometimes, the belts are off straight from the factory, but more often it happens because of an unusual impact like a pothole or a large rock on the road.  Take a close look at your tires, and if you see any bulges in the tread, it means a belt has slipped and you should replace the tire immediately.  Bulges and simples on the sidewall of the tire are perfectly normal and acceptable, though.

There used to be a rumor across Jacksonville, FL, maybe thirty years ago, that cross-rotating radial tires wasn't a good idea, and that only basic alignment changes were appropriate for them.  The truth is, there never was such an issue with radial tires, it was an exaggerated misunderstanding of the findings of a few engineers.  Knowing that it's OK to cross-rotate radial tires means that if you feel a pull while you're driving, you're OK to switch them and see if the pull goes away or reverses. 

If you're not having any belt issues and the pull is still there after you've cross-rotated your tires, it's time to look into alignment changes.  Have some of Jackonville, FL's tire professionals look into it; they'll check the caster, camber, and toe, and make any adjustments that need to be made. 

After that, it's just up to you to test-drive your hand-checked, cross-rotated, alignment-changes-made car and make sure that everything did, in fact, work in the end. Just remember that some roads are crowned to allow for drainage, so on some roads a slight pull to the right is normal at any speed -- no further checks or alignment changes are needed.

Sport utility vehicle owners in Jacksonville, FL generally don't put that much thought into putting passenger tires on SUV's, but there are some pretty good reasons for doing so.  Passenger tires, in general, are softer-riding, longer-lasting, and less capable of off-road driving than SUV tires, which are deliberately designed to be a midpoint between passenger tires and truck tires.  Here are seven big things that passenger tires have over SUV tires:

Comfort

Passenger tires run at a lower air pressure than SUV tires do, so they act as the first stage of shock absorption, handling tiny bumps like those from pebbles on the road without even nudging your 'real' shock absorbers.  Combine that with a less rigid sidewall than an SUV tire, and you're looking at a much more comfy ride overall.

Handling

SUV tires have a deeper tread than passenger tires, which can be good for getting a grip in off-road or muddy conditions, but it's not good for handling.  Deeper tread means more wiggle room for each part of the tire, which means that tire is much more prone to slipping under any significant amount of sideways pressure -- like going around a corner at any decent speed. 

Wet Roads

Passenger tires are built with very specific tread patterns designed to funnel water away from the contact surface.  SUV tires are built with tread patterns that are midway between the water-readiness of passenger tires and the serious off-road grip of light truck tires -- which means that when you hit a puddle at high speed on SUV tires, you're much more likely to go hydroplaning.  Most SUV's in Jacksonville, FL are family vehicles, so staying in control is a strong argument for keeping passenger tires on SUV's.

Braking

SUV tires have wider gaps in their tread than passenger tires do -- all the better to increase the pound-per-square-inch force the tires exert on the terrain under them, for off-roading purposes.  But that same choice also means that there's less rubber touching the road at any given time, which means that when you slam on the brakes, you've got less friction, which means significantly longer breaking distances.  Not what you want for a family vehicle.

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