Do you remember when the UHV band was added to the television broadcast spectrum? As the old manual TV tuner in our photo illustrates, the new band brought roughly a seven-fold increase in the number of potential broadcast stations (up from the original 12). Later, as cable and then satellite TV gained a foothold in […]
Unfamiliar shouldn’t mean impossible. Here’s how to check a Mazda rotary engine for basic mechanical integrity. An engine most of us have always found interesting, but (if you’re like me) haven’t worked on enough to know as well as our interest would incline is the Wankel rotary used on Mazdas, mostly in recent years their […]
Cars with the acceleration of a gasoline engine and the fuel economy of a hybrid, all with an almost classic oil-hammer engine. What’s the drama? (Hint: You already know most of the cast!) The subtle control circuits are too bad, in a way, because the traditional, non-electronic Diesel engine was so simple: If you didn’t […]
After an astonishing 184,000 miles, the original clutch on this one-owner 1987 BMW 325iS finally decided it had completed its tour of duty. The way it failed was curious, though. Instead of the typical symptoms of gradually slipping and losing engagement, the owner said the car developed a decided ‘crunch’ in the clutch pedal, followed […]
July’s Front Counter Mechanics discussed the Microsoft Office suite of products. The article was published not because we at Import Service own lots of Microsoft stock (Don’t we wish!), but because Office has become the standard of business information exchange. So, what exactly is ‘business information exchange?’ The way this article comes to you is […]
Some of the earliest cars had an odd, pivoting stalk on the steering column, right where most cars have the turn signal/headlight switch now. A few others had one on the dash. Serrations along a quadrant held the position you chose. It’s a long-gone control – the spark advance lever, used to manually change the […]
Planned obsolescence was once a fact of life in dealer showrooms. Last year’s models automatically looked outdated and tired, just as soon as the new models and the new advertising were released. Those who bought into the ‘newer is better’ sales pitch replaced their cars every two or three years. This was probably a good […]
Dead Volvo in the Morning; Shifting Shakeup; Sweating It Out; Rack Heads-Up; Antenna Armor; Filing a Jag Switch
It’s the descendant oft eh D-Jet fuel injection system and the electromechanically simplest form of fuel injection currently in manufacture – simplest, that is, if you don’t count the system’s software operations as electromechanical.
As we learned in Part One of this article (Import Service, June 2000), we owe Georg Simon Ohm a debt of gratitude for the electrical principles he published in 1827, which later came to be known as Ohm’s Law. These principles explained in mathematical form the relationship of voltage (E), current (I) and resistance (R) […]