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Car care 101: finishing up under the hood
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At this point, we're pretty much done with our under-the-hood tour of our 2005 Cobalt example car. There only remains one major piece to look at and we can move on to a brief round up before we set out on another series of articles.
The last major check that has to be made under the hood is the air filter. This one's easy to reach. Look at the photo accompanying this story and you'll see what looks like a long flexible tube stretching across the engine that's hooked to a square box. That, my friends, is the air filter.
It should be changed, roughly once a year, if you're like most drivers who use their cars for highway commuting and going places on weekends. In these cases, you're unlikely to run into anything serious that should either give you poor performance or mileage.
If, on the other hand, you drive through lots of dust or in other rough locations, then changing your the air filter, even every three months, isn't out of the question. It all depends on the driving you do. It might also be a good idea to do a six-month change if you do a lot of stop-and-go city driving or idling as your engine can pick up some pretty nasty stuff from other cars and trucks around you.
In most cars, using the Cobalt as an example, a good telltale that the air filter needs a change is performance. If your car is running poorly and you can't figure out why or if the mileage is dropping and the engine is running roughly, then that's another indication that it could be air-starved. This is the job of the air filter, to keep clean air running into the intake manifold.
So, how do you change it? It's really very simple. Look at the photo and you'll see a couple of snaps on the top of the housing. Just loosen these snaps the pull out the air filter module -- in this case a square -- in older cars in might be a large donut, sitting right on top of the intake. The best idea here is to check with the owner's manual to find out the part placement and number of the air filter and follow how to swap it out.
The Cobalt's pretty straight forward. It's pretty much plug-and-play, just get the right part from your dealer's parts department or at PepBoys or AutoZone or your local CAP or NAPA and you can quickly swap one module for another. Be sure, by the way, to dispose of it properly. You might ask your local service station how to do it.
That pretty much covers our underhood work. There's a whole world of mechanical work needed at particular intervals, as recommended by the manufacturer, so it would be a good idea to take a long read of that document and see what the manufacturer recommends and then follow the ideas.
Since most of us don't have the sophisticated tools, unless we're blessed with a professional garage or a father, father-in-law or brother or other relative who's a mechanic, we'll have to defer to the dealer for things like CV joint checks and bearing changes (which used to be easy). So, let's close hood on Car Care 101 because if you've followed all of our recommendations, you car should be ready for winter.
