Monthly Archives: February 2020

5 Important Things to Take Along On a Road Trip

The idea of a road trip sounds quite interesting, especially for the ones who love to travel and visit places around the world! One can really enjoy and get peace being on the road for hours. But your road trip can also get ruined if your arrangements are not proper. Therefore, to ensure that you have a really good road trip, below listed are some really important stuff that you must take along:

  1. Extra Fuel:

Firstly, when you leave your place for the road trip, refill your fuel tank so that the fuel level in your vehicle does not bother you for a long time ahead. Also, to be on a safe side, you shall carry a decent amount of extra fuel with you so that if in any case you run out of fuel, you don’t have to look for fuel stations on long highways. This measure will ensure that your schedule for the road trip as well as your vacation mood does not spoil. 

  1. Caravan:

Any other vehicle for a road trip would work but caravan would really be a comfortable option. Sometimes traveling or driving for long hours can be hectic and tiring. Thus, your vehicle itself will be an option for you to take a halt and rest for a few hours. Also, the place where you are visiting may or may not have good options to stay. Here again a caravan becomes a comfortable place to stay and rest. Therefore, one must buy pop top campers to make their trip a comfortable one. 

  1. Food:

Before finalizing the place for your road trip, make sure you have researched that place for the type of food. Not food of all locations suits you and traveling with an empty stomach sounds like a really bad idea. Therefore, take some ready to eat snacks with so as an emergency kit. This food will also help you in case you are struck anywhere due to any reason. Also, don’t forget to keep enough water with you so that you stay hydrated throughout the trip. 

  1. Clothes and Stuff:

It is obvious that when you are on a vacation and going on a road trip, you are not going to wash your clothes during the trip. Thus, if your trip is going to last for a longer number of days, then keep clothes accordingly. Rather, keep some extra clothes so that you stay hygienic during the trip. Also, you must pack gears for the activities you are going to perform at that place, like swimwear and hiking shoes. 

  1.  Emergency Kit:

It is good to be ready for any emergency, especially when you are going on a road trip. Thus, keel a kit along with you which has a torch, medicines, batteries, bandages and a tool kit along with it. Moreover, if you feel that the place or highways are unsafe, then you must carry something protective, just in case anything wrong happens.

5 Interesting Things to Learn This Summer

Summers bring a lot of energy and we all are in a mood to do and learn something new. But most often, we procrastinate on the idea of learning something very interesting. Later we realize that the entire summer gets ruined by delaying this idea. Your summer break becomes the best opportunity to explore something different. At this young age, we must pick up the opportunity to explore the world! Therefore, let’s enjoy and utilize this summer by exploring some interesting activities:

  1. Learn Vehicles:

During our daily chaotic life, we often face problems of getting late since we do not know how to drive. One can easily overcome this problem by joining a driving school during the summers. Believe me, you will enjoy learning to drive. Moreover, if motorbikes kept attracting you since your childhood, you can also opt for motorbike training in Sydney. These skills will make you feel happy and be useful later. 

  1. Music:

If you love listening to music, you must try doing the same. Listening to music for a long time develops a good music sense and hence you probably will be a good musician. Therefore, think of an instrument which attracts you the most and start learning it during the summers. Also, you may start singing if you believe that you are good at croon. These activities will help you develop co-curricular activities to do apart from your professional work. 

  1. Sport:

It may be difficult for an individual to accept that he is becoming lazy and obese day by day. This affects your daily activities and performance. To get better at this, you shall join and start playing a sport. You will enjoy this change for sure. This will not only reshape your body but also will male you active. This is a recreational as well as a productive way of spending a summer break well! 

  1. Professional Classes:

All of us have areas in our profession where we have a weak point where we lack. If you feel like to improvise and work upon that weak area, you must join some related professional classes. This may be a kind of boring activity to do during the summers, but the result will be very fruitful later. Ahead in your career, your weak area will rather change into a strong area! Hence, if you are really fed up with your weak areas of profession and you feel to come over it, join some related tutorials which will help you out. 

  1. Internship:

While perusing a particular profession, one may feel attracted to and want to explore some other field. Summers is the best time where you can put your first steps into new areas and calm down your curious mind. Thus, look for an internship related to the area of your interest and look if things over there work for you or not. In this case, along with experience, you will also earn some splendid! Therefore, it leaves no reason for us to not go for an internship.

This quiz proves that it’s the end of the hobbyist mechanic!

Can you tell your carburettor from your crank shaft? Ethical car recycling company Scrap Car Network has designed a quiz that challenges respondents to identify some of the most vital car parts which keep their engines running. Take the quiz for yourself, the results are quite surprising!

Only about 36% of respondents struggled to identify some of their car’s most essential components, hinting that increasingly fewer drivers have the confidence or knowledge to tackle DIY maintenance themselves. Here are just a few of the most likely reasons why!

Evolving technologies require more specialist skill

For decades, the majority of problems with cars have been mainly mechanical in nature, which meant that mechanics have been primarily equipped with wrenches, screwdrivers, hammers, ratchets, and similar nuts-and-bolts tools.

Now though, the increasingly software-driven nature of most vehicles means that modern mechanics often need basic programming and technical IT skills too. Almost all cars have an Engine Control Unit – essentially an electronic ‘brain’ that monitors and controls engine power and performance, fuel mixture, emissions levels and more.

Nowadays, mechanics need to use specialised diagnostic tools to interface with the ECU to acquire fault codes, which will help them to identify and fix the problem. These sorts of specialist skills and equipment aren’t always available to most hobbyist mechanics, unless they’re willing to spend the considerable time and effort required to obtain them.

The imminent arrival of electric cars and self-driving vehicles will form even greater barriers to hobbyist mechanics without the specialist skills. Even professional mechanics often need additional training to handle electric vehicles. Plus, AI complexity may mean that core technical skills becomes a bare minimum requirement for anyone wishing to safely work on self-driving cars. And as some unfortunate owners know, certain software issues can kill a car just as surely as any hardware problems. On that note…

Complex and unpredictable software makes diagnosis harder

The increasingly software-driven nature of cars poses other big problems. Even if you’ve got the basic technical skills to tackle them, the unpredictable nature of software issues means they can be complex in ways that aren’t immediately obvious. See, the thing with combustion engines is that everything is linked logically. Problems can be narrowed down to one specific area because one part isn’t connecting properly, or failing to connect when it should, or in contact with something it shouldn’t be.

Where software is involved though, all bets are off. Computer chips now manage air bags, door locks, ignition timing, fuel injection, gear selection, and even the brakes. Even if a car is in perfect condition mechanically, software faults can still prevent it from being driven. The ECU might be excessively limiting the engine power for reasons best known to itself, or the immobiliser may fail to recognise a normally valid key.

Certain software faults can also cause knock-on issues in related systems, and these can be hugely dangerous. For example, a small bug with cruise control can end up causing sudden acceleration, an issue which has the potential to maim or even kill. (Just ask Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, who experienced it for himself.) These sorts of problems might prove particularly difficult for hobbyist mechanics to diagnose. Even if they do successfully identify the issue, many would probably wisely entrust the actual repair to a professional anyway.

Mistakes are far more costly (and risky) to fix

The thing about electronic issues is that because they’re so unpredictable, they can be very easy to break and very expensive to repair – two factors which immediately make hobbyist car mechanics more wary of trying to tackle them. With physical parts, things are generally straightforward enough – even if you don’t know how to fix the issue, it’s often relatively easy to diagnose what’s gone wrong, and where. But where electrical issues are concerned, it’s anyone’s guess.

If you have to bring in a professional because you’ve botched a software repair, the labour involved in the re-diagnosis alone can sometimes end up costing just as much as the actual fix. The problem doesn’t even have to be particularly complex to be expensive – just ask anyone who’s had to replace an infotainment display screen, or a reversing camera lens.

And as we touched upon briefly above, there are legal complications. Certain safety-focused issues with software are already extremely risky for hobbyist mechanics to just ‘take a crack at it’ unless they know exactly what they’re doing. So much so that plenty of current legislation already restricts them from trying, and we can’t see it becoming more relaxed in the near future. (After all, if a self-taught mechanic fixed the software bugs in your self-driving car, how happy would you be to take a ride in it afterwards?)

So, it’s all quite the laundry list of barriers for hobbyist mechanics, but that’s not to say all petrolheads have to bring their hobby to a full stop immediately. For practical repairs, hobbyists can still save themselves time and money with simple maintenance jobs like changing fluids and changing spark plugs. Plus, it’s likely to be at least ten years before electric cars and self driving cars become the majority of cars on our roads – leaving casual mechanics plenty of time to tinker and experiment with existing models until then. In terms of in-depth tune-ups and serious modifications though, it looks like it won’t be long until they’re jobs best left solely to the professionals.