Car maintenance can be expensive, especially if you must go to an auto repair shop when something broke. Car maintenance DIY tries to prevent well known problems before they happen as well as fixing auto when necessary. Here in this post, I will show you super easy car maintenance DIY Top 5 tips!
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Car Maintenance DIY?
Car Maintenance DIY includes any car/auto mechanic Do It Yourself items that you can take care of fairly easily. For those female readers who are not comfortable doing any auto repair yourself, let your husband, male/female friend or anybody else who is willing do the task for you. The ones I am showing here are vehicle repair DIY tasks to fix auto without going to car repair shops! These are more of maintenance tasks that will prevent further damage on your car components.
Doing these on your own or do them regularly at the auto repair shops will certainly enable your cars to last looooooooooong!!
For those who don’t believe me, here are my records. I have two Japanese cars. One is at 175K miles and another is at 130K miles. I have kept those for over 10 years. One is at 13 years mark to be exact. They still run great, and I am still counting on keeping them for another several years. The goal is obviously to achieve 200K mile mark and join the 200K mile car driver community. 😁
Car Maintenance DIY 1: Check tire air.
Car Maintenance DIY 1 is to check the tire air BEFORE you ride. I always look around the car and check if the cars’ tires are inflated ok.
Have you noticed you had a flat tire, but you didn’t even notice it? If the air is really out with a big nail or something, you can almost immediately tell the flat needs to be repaired. However, in many cases, when you have just a small hole on the tire and the air goes out very slowly, the tire may look fine and you don’t even know the air is going out.
Sure, you can use the air gauge. Take out the tire plug one by one check with the tire gauge air pressure. If it’s low, then push the air in.
NOOOOOOOOOO… Sorry, that takes too long. It may take your precious 10-15 min of your morning commute time.
We don’t want that.
Instead, I have found this to be quite helpful. Take a look.
When the air is enough, it shows green at the edge. If not, you won’t see green.
With this plug, you visually see the air is ok, and you can immediately start driving. It takes only 5 seconds of your morning time while somebody else is getting into the car. You can check it out here.
iSaddle New Car Tire Pressure Monitor Valve Cap w/Sensor Indicator 3 Color Eye Alert 4Pcs
This is probably one of the best small car repair gadgets I may have gotten.
If you find the tire is really out of the air, what do you do?
Look around the tire. If you can see the nail, you may want to ask somebody (if not you) to repair flat. Don’t drive if all possible or change to spare tire if you need to drive right away. Either way the tire must be repaired by somebody before reattaching to the car.
The flat tire repair is not that hard to do if you DIY. If you are an AAA member, I think they provide a free flat repair. That might be the easiest if you can wait that long. If not, you can use something like these to repair it in no time.
Slime 1034-A T-Handle Tire Plug Kit
By the way, keeping the correct tire pressure not only is safer to drive but also helps provide good mileage in many cars. So it’s just a good idea to follow this.
Car Maintenance DIY 2: Wiper blade replacement
Car Maintenance DIY 2 is the Wiper blade replacement. This is another easy one. Long story short, this is as simple as take it out, and stick it in, usually with a simple squeeze on the tab. The most difficult part is probably to find the correct length of the wiper blade. Many cars have different length for driver, passenger side and the back windows, etc. These are pretty good ones. Sometimes some of these go on sale, and you may want to buy in bulk to cover next few times of replacement.
If you do go to local auto repair shops, they may ask to replace your wiper blade. This usually gets much more expensive than you DIY. Save money by DIY here.
Car Maintenance DIY 3: Cabin Air Filter replacement
Car Maintenance DIY 3 is Cabin Air Filter replacement. Cabin Air Filter cleans the air that comes into your car from outside. It may keep pollens away from coming in, etc.
This is one of those auto components that is super easy to repair or replace, yet others charge you pretty expensive in my opinion. Usually, all you need is a screw driver, and the replacement is as easy as just swapping it.
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Car Maintenance DIY 4: Engine Air Filter replacement
Car Maintenance DIY 4 is Engine Air Filter replacement. This air filter is recommended to get replaced every 12K miles. Do you remember when you replaced yours?
Check your car maintenance manual for details. This also is usually super easy. Just take out a couple of clips, swap it out with the new one, and that’s it!!
The Amazon one provides information on whether it actually fits your car or not. This is pretty helpful since some Walmarts don’t have the big reference manual that shows the model number of the filter you need for your particular car.
Car Maintenance DIY 5: Engine Oil Check
Car Maintenance DIY 5 is Engine Oil Check. This is to check the Engine Oil level. Just to make sure you have the oil at the appropriate level. If you don’t have enough, your engine may be leaking (which needs to be looked at) or you just don’t have enough oil in the engine. Pouring engine oil into the engine is also super easy. Just make sure you have the correct Engine oil (5W-20, etc.). If you are a messy person (?!), a funnel may also help.
I am NOT including the actual Engine Oil replacement. Because, if you look around coupons you get in mail, etc., many local vehicle repair shops include Engine Oil replacement coupons for around $20. Sure, you may have to make an appointment and wait for a while at the vehicle repair shop. If you DIY, you still end up buying the Engine Oil itself, Engine Oil Filter and you spend your hour to do the Engine Oil change. Furthermore, you have to recycle the dirty engine oil. These would almost cost at least $20 DIY…
I am not sure about you, but I don’t see a lot of reasons DIYing Engine Oil change.
Just remember NOT to skip the Engine Oil Change every 3K to 5K miles. Since my cars are getting older, I also use these additives. So far I think these are doing their job since my engines haven’t blown yet!!
Car Maintenance DIY Top 5 Super Easy!
Car Maintenance DIY Top 5 items are super easy as you may already noticed. It’s always a good start to DIY things you can actually handle and you will soon step up to do more difficult car maintenance. Lately, I attempted the break pad repair, engine repair, fog light repair, light bulb repair, etc. My lovely wife thinks we are saving so much that if we really saved the money in an envelope, we could probably buy a new car by now. I couldn’t agree more, and we should actually have done it.
Car Maintenance DIY Top 5 Super Easy! Summary
Thanks for reading “Car Maintenance DIY Top 5 – Super Easy Secrets!” Car Maintenance DIY can be started from super easy items. These are what we covered.
Car Maintenance DIY 1: Check tire airs.
Car Maintenance DIY 2: Wiper blade replacement
Car Maintenance DIY 3: Cabin Air Filter replacement
Car Maintenance DIY 4: Engine Air Filter replacement
Car Maintenance DIY 5: Engine Oil Check
I hope you have enjoyed this content. You surely can do these on your own. These days, YouTube is your friend. You can learn almost everything and car maintenance DIY is very well covered at YouTube. Check this out for instance on super easy wiper blade replacement.
I haven’t covered many other car maintenance DIY items, like the light bulb replacement. Please leave a comment below on what else you have DIY for your car maintenance!
By the way, this site is super helpful, a DIY’s best fried. Look for various car repair guides. I looked at their break pad repair guide to do mine.
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these are good tips. however, i’ve seen those colored tire pressure indicator valve caps themselves leak air. since they need to push the valve in some to sense the pressure, they can leak if they’re not seated all the way.