Des Moines Auto Repair

If your brakes fail, it could be fatal. At the least, you’ll be on the hook for some brake repairs and your car will be our of service for a few days. Regular service is not only the best way to ensure your safety --- its the most cost-effective way to keep your brakes working. To understand what, exactly, your brakes require from you to keep working properly, you need a brief overview of your braking system. How the modern braking system works The brake pedal is mounted on a lever. Your foot applies mechanical force to this lever, which is transferred to the brake booster. The brake booster transfers it to the brake master cylinder, which you can find underneath the brake fluid reservoir in the hood compartment.The master cylinder is located here, because it needs to draw fluid into the braking system and pressurize it. This sends pressure through your brake lines (which are hydraulic hoses de ... read more

The first commercially produced automotive transmissions were simple manual gearboxes. In the early days of motoring, cars were not affordable for everyone. Roads weren’t suited for the high speeds that we drive at today, so cars simply weren’t built to travel that fast. A standard gearbox had one reverse gear and 2 forward gears. Like with modern manual gearboxes, the driver used a clutch pedal and shift lever to select gears. The clutch pedal disengages the motor input from the transmission, so that the gears are not forcibly turning as they mesh together. The shift lever, naturally, aligns the appropriate gear with the motor input. The perceived problem with these transmissions, though, was that it was inconvenient to have to shift manually. Apparently, it also required a fair amount of force. This made shifting a distraction from the road, and made it unappealing for women to ... read more

The point of a transmission is to improve fuel economy, improve acceleration and reduce engine wear. To do this, your transmission uses leverage to create different outputs from the motor input. Basically, there is an ideal range of RPM’s for your motor to operate in, which we’ll refer to as the powerband. Too low, and you don’t have enough power. Too high, and your engine will be loud, run too hot, and consume copious amounts of fuel. Different transmissions have different ways of creating the ideal torque output for any given situation. Over the last century, mechanical geniuses have pushed the envelope, creating the various transmissions that are available today. Manual gearbox The first type of vehicle transmission to ever be produced commercially was, predictably, the simplest to understand. Manual gearboxes need the driver to select the appropriate gear range for their driving conditions ... read more

  Let’s take a second to pay homage to the 20thcentury geniuses that designed the automatic transmission, because its next-level stuff. In principle, the way they work is actually quite simple ---once its been explained. So for this article, we’ll stick to that, and not worry your head (our ours) with the complex details. So how does an automatic transmission know when to shift, especially when it often needs to shift at different RPMs? While its true that modern vehicles use sensors for most of the of work, the automatic transmission has been around since the 1940’s. Until the use of onboard computers late in the 20thcentury, shifting was controlled mechanically. And even when computers and sensors are used, the things they monitor are still the same. Here’s how it works Mechanical magic The first thing to understand is that the automatic transmission is actual ... read more