Airbrush Technique

Airbrushing Made Easy is all about teaching everyone out there with an interest that they can learn the best airbrush technique and directions to create some really awesome looking art. This is not an art form that you simply have to sit back and admire and wonder if you could do, you can actually do it. If you are really into cars and you want to make the ones you own stand out among the rest, you can learn an airbrushing painting technique or two. With a few flames or an involved mural, your vehicles will truly be unique and people will not be able to help but notice them.

If you are not sure whether or not you have the talent to do this art form, you needn’t worry about that, you simply need to have an interest in it and you can probably perfect the techniques in a few weeks time. Before you know it you will be using the airbrush technique you learned from us on your vehicles to really infuse them with your style. Think about it, you can spend hundreds or even thousands of dollars on special kits and customizing your car, but nothing makes a car as unique and individual as a good paint job. And, you do not have to pay an arm and a leg to have your paint job done, instead you can do it yourself to ensure that it is just right and just what you were looking for.

Every airbrushing painting technique you could ever need can be learned from Airbrushing Made Easy by downloading our very comprehensive e-book. In our e-book we will walk you through all of the steps to work an airbrushing machine, create templates, and make your creative vision come to life on any surface. With step by step guidelines that do not talk down to you or get too technical, you will find that you can pick up this art form quite easily. You may not start out as the next big name in the art world, but in time you can become truly great.

This is an art form you can use in so many ways. When you visit www.airbrushing-made-easy.com, you will see an extensive list of all that we can do for you with our simple to read and follow e-book. Not only that, we have added in some bonuses to make this small investment even more worthwhile. What are you waiting for -- there is no time like the present to add a personal touch to everything that gets in your way!

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Change Oil

Below is a generic, idiots-guide to changing the oil in your engine. It's not specific to any particular car but ought to cover most engines.
Before you start, you'll need the following :

• new oil (duh!)
• a drain pan
• an oil funnel
• rags
• a socket wrench set and / or hex wrench set (allen wrenches)
• an oil filter remover
• a new crush washer
• nitrile gloves (not latex - mineral oil eats latex gloves)
• engineer / shop manual, if one is available

• Start your engine and run it for a couple of minutes to get some heat into the oil
• Leave the engine to stand for 5 or 10 minutes. When you started it, it heated the oil but it also filled the oilways. You want the oil to drain back to the sump.
• Take the dipstick out or loosen it off and break the seal where it plugs into the engine dipstick tube. This prevents a vacuum building up behind the oil when you start to drain it.
• Get your drain pan / oil container and stuff it under the sump. Make sure it's sitting under the sump drain plug. I Really like the combined drainer / container types. They look like regular oil containers but if you lay them on their side, there's a pop-out plug. When you drain the oil, it runs into the side of the container, then you can put the plug back in and use the same container to take the oil away.

• Put your rubber gloves on. Try to use the disposable type. Your mum / wife will never forgive you if you use the washing-up gloves. Remember - used oil is toxic and carcinogenic. If you get it on your skin, it could cause problems. Use your socket wrench or allen wrench to loosen the sump plug just slightly. Once it's loose, remove it by hand.

• Be amazed as the black syrup runs out of the engine and into your container. Be more amazed how, if it's windy, those last dregs just won't hit the container no matter where you put it. They will however go all over the road/garage floor/cat.
• Remove the old crush washer from the sump plug and throw it away. Replace it with a new one. Use some of the oil from the drain container on the end of a rag to wipe around the drain hole in the sump. This will help clean any mess away and leave you with a smooth surface. Screw the sump plug back in by hand until it's finger tight and then use your wrench to crush the washer. This can vary from a quarter turn to a half turn. Don't overdo it or you'll strip the threads. Similarly, don't leave it too loose or it will fall out. If in doubt, use a torque wrench set to the value indicated in your shop manual.

• Now get your oil filter remover out. Push the oil drain container under the oil filter - when you spin it off, there will be a lot of oil comes out. Use the filter remover to grip the oil filter and spin it off anticlockwise. 99.9% of oil filters take some muscle to get going. This is why a filter remover is a must-have. Stabbing the filter with a screwdriver and using brute force may work, but you'll be finding oil all over yourself for weeks to come if you use that method. Apart from that, some cars have aluminium inserts that protrude out of the engine block into the body of the filter, so firing a screw driver into the filter near its base (the strongest part) may shear that aluminium bit off the engine block. That Would Be Bad. If you really can't lay hands on a filter wrench, try sandpaper - wrap it around the filter, sand-side-in and grip the paper backing - you might be able to spin the filter off like that. Once the filter is finger-loose, spin it off by hand. (these things below are filter removers)filter wrenches

• Clean off the face of the oil filter mount on the side of the engine block using a rag. Use a little oil on a rag to wipe around the seal of the new filter and spin it on by hand. Once it's locked against the side of the engine block, another quarter-turn by hand is normally enough to secure it in place.
• Pull the drain container out from under the car and use a rag to wipe down any excess oil that has spilled down the side of the engine block. Pay attention around the sump plug and the filter. These are places you'll be checking later for leaks so the cleaner they are now, the better.
• Use a little WD40 on the oil container and an old rag to clean the remaining oil down into the container. Put the plug back in and make sure it fits snug. That's your waste oil. Don't drink it.
• Up to the top of the again engine now. Put the dipstick back in. Find the oil filler cap and take it off. It might say "OIL" or it might say "710". It is not a "710 cap" as one person once asked for. "710" is "OIL" upside-down. Some people need to be told....
• Look in your shop manual for the system capacity with filter change. This will be more than the capacity without a filter change. A lot of oil containers now come with capacity marks on the side of them. Put your oil funnel into the oil filler hole and pour in the right amount of oil. Do it slowly. If you do it quick, you'll get airlocks and the funnel will burp oil in your face.
• Once you're happy you've got enough oil in there (check it with the dipstick if you're not sure), remove the funnel, replace the oil cap and replace the dipstick.
• Pull the main high tension wire from the distributor cap or in some way disable the engine so that you can crank it over but it WILL NOT start. (Note : you might want to pull out the fuel pump fuse too - if you crank the engine without it starting, it will still be pumping fuel - that could cause a backfire or damage the catalyst). Crank it over until the low pressure light goes off, and another 15-20 seconds for good measure. You are pumping new oil into the empty filter and then expelling all the air from the oil lines and cavities.
• Replace the high tension lead (and fuel pump fuse) and start the engine and let it idle for a minute or so. Stop the engine. I don't want you crawling under a car to look for leaks when the engine is running. There's so many things that can go wrong with spinning fan blades, belts, human hair, clothes, fingers and the odd dodgy auto-gearbox that will slip into "D" and run you over.
• With the engine off have a look at the side of the engine block around the oil filter. Check the area around the sump drain too. Both should be as clean as you left them with no sign of leaks. If there's a leak, a little tightening of the drain plug or filter should cure it.

One reader suggested and additional step before (9) above. When he changes his filter, he fills the new one up with clean oil and waits for it to soak into the filter itself. Once he's satisfied that the filter is soaked, he pours the excess oil out of the filter and then screws it on to the engine.

Job well done. Now you should have hands that smell of talcum powder and rubber (from the gloves), a couple of greasy, slippery tools and a container full of old oil. Oh, and a crush washer and filter. If you've got more than this, you took something off that I didn't tell you to. If you turned the engine off before checking for leaks, you should also have a full complement of fingers, hair (if you had it to start with) and you should still be fully clothed. Congratulations. You've changed your engine oil.

Source : Carbibles

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Oil Filters and Filtration

It's all very well changing your oil often, but it's not just the oil that helps prevent engine wear. The oil filter does its part too. Dirt is the prime cause of engine wear. Not big dirt, like you'd see in a yard, but minute particles of dirt. It's dirt nevertheless, and it's abrasive. These contaminants vary from road dust (which are razor-like flakes from an engine's perspective) that doesn't get filtered out by the air filter, up to actual metal particles - the byproducts of the casting scarf from the original engine manufacture, and basic engine wear. All this nastiness is carried around by the oil into the minute parts of your engine, being rammed into the precision clearances between bearings and other moving parts.

Once in, they don't come out easy, but tend to stay there, wearing grooves, grinding and generally messing up your engine. Other debris that causes problems are a by-product of the mere way an engine works - sooty particles from the combustion process can be forced past the piston rings and transported around in the oil too. This is definitely A Bad Thing - the soot acts like a sponge and soaks up other oil additives reducing the oil's anti-wear properties, and messing up it's viscosity. All this dirt is why oil goes black when it's used. That lovely syrup-like yellow that it is when you put it in is pure oil. The black stuff that comes out at an oil change is the same oil full of contaminants and by-products from wear and tear.

That's where the oil filter comes in. It's job is to catch all this crap floating around in the oil, and to stop it from recirculating. Most oil filters that you or I will ever see are the spin-on type. They're shaped like an aluminium can and spin on to a threaded oil feeder poking out of the side of the engine somewhere. They're called 'full-flow' oil filters because they sit in the normal flow of the oil through the engine. Sort of like an electrical component in series with all the other electrical component. Because it sits in-line, it has to be designed not to restrict the flow of oil around the circuit, and thus can only really be effective at stopping the larger particles. Large, in this case, is around the 20micron size. So here's the catch. The smallest contaminants are in the 10-20micron size range. Not only is that "extremely small", but it means that they pass right through the oil filter and back out into circulation. This is why regular oil changes are a necessity, because these tiny little things can be the most damaging.
This is an exploded view of a typical spin-on oil filter used in automotive applications. I've sliced the filter element (the brownish-yellow part) so you can see the internal structure of the filter). Typically the engine oil enters through the ring of 5 or 6 holes in the base and into the main cannister. From there it is forced inwards through the filter element, through the drain holes in the central core and out through the central, threaded hole in the base.

There is another alternative, but it's only really used in heavy applications or for racing. That alternative is to fit a secondary bypass oil filter. This is sort of like a filter in parallel with the primary one. It doesn't restrict the flow of oil in the main circuit, but the oil that passes through it is filtered down to the 5 micron range, thus removing even the smallest contaminants. The newest filters claim to work down to 1 micron, though I can't confirm nor deny those claims. The upside is that by cleaning the oil so completely, bypass oil filters increase not only engine life, but also the life of the oil itself. This means longer service intervals.

Source : Carbibles

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Engine Cooling Systems

It stands to reason that if you fill a metal engine with fuel and air hundreds of times a second and make it explode, the whole thing is going to get pretty hot. To stop it all from melting into a fused lump of steel and aluminium, all engines have some method of keeping them cool.

Air cooling

You don't see this much on car engines at all now. The most famous cars it was used on were rear-engined boxers like the original VW Beetle, Karmann Ghia, and Porsche Roadsters. It is still used a lot on motorbike engines because it's a very simple method of cooling. For air cooling to work, you need two things - fins (lots of them) and good airflow. An air-cooled engine is normally easy to spot because of the fins built into the outside of the cylinders. The idea is simple - the fins act as heat sinks, getting hot with the engine but transferring the heat to the air as the air passes through and between them. Air-cooled engines don't work particularly well in long, hot traffic jams though, because obviously there's very little air passing over the fins. They are good in the winter when the air is coldest, but that illustrates a weak spot in the whole design. Air cooled engines can't regulate the overall temperature of the cylinder heads and engine, so the temperature tends to swing up and down depending on engine load, air temperature and forward speed. A famous problem with air-cooling is associated with V-twin motorcycles. Because the rear cylinder is tucked in the frame behind the front cylinder, its supply of cool, uninterrupted air is extremely limited and so in these designs, the rear cylinder tends to run extremely hot compared to the front.

The image on the right is ©Ducati and shows the engine from the Monster 695 motorbike. It's a good example of modern air-cooled design and you can see the fins on the engine are all angled towards the direction of travel so the air can flow through them freely.

Oil cooling

To some extent, all engines have oil-cooling. It's one of the functions of the engine oil - to transfer heat away from the moving parts and back to the sump where fins on the outside of the sump can help transfer that heat out into the air. But for some engines, the oil system itself is designed to be a more efficient cooling system. BMW 'R' motorbikes are known for this (their nickname is 'oilheads'). As the oil moves around the engine, at some points it's directed through cooling passageways close to the cylinder bores to pick up heat. From there it goes to an oil radiator placed out in the airflow to disperse the heat into the air before returning into the core of the engine. Actually, in the case of the 'R' motorbikes, they're air- and oil-cooled as they have the air-cooling fins on the cylinders too. For a quick primer on how the radiator itself works, read on....

Water cooling

This is by far and away the most common method of cooling and engine down. With water cooling, a coolant mixture is pumped around pipes and passageways inside the engine separate to the oil, before passing out to a radiator. The radiator itself is made of metal, and it forces the coolant to flow through long passageways each of which have lots of metal fins attached to the outside giving a huge surface area. The coolant transfers its heat into the metal of the radiator, which in turn transfers the heat into the surround air through the fins - essentially just like the air-cooled engine fins. The coolant itself is normally a mixture of distilled water and an antifreeze component. The water needs to be distilled because if you just use tap water, all the minerals in it will deposit on the inside of the cooling system and mess it up. The antifreeze is in the mix, obviously to stop the liquid from freezing in cold weather. If it froze up, you'd have no cooling at all and the engine would overheat and weld itself together in a matter of minutes. The antifreeze mix normally also has other chemicals in it for corrosion resistance too and when mixed correctly it raises the boiling point of water, so even in the warmer months of the year, a cooling system always needs a water / antifreeze mix in it.

The coolant system in a typical car is under pressure once the engine is running, as a byproduct of the water pump and the expansion that water undergoes as it heats up. Because of the coolant mixture, the water in the cooling system can get over 100°C without boiling which is why it's never a good idea to open the radiator cap immediately after you've turned the engine off. If you do, a superheated mixture of steam and coolant will spray out and you'll spend some quality time in a burns unit.

The complexities of water cooling. Water cooling is the most common method of cooling and engine down, but it's also the most complicated. For example you don't want the coolant flowing through the radiator as soon as you start the engine. If it did, the engine would take a long time to come up to operating temperature which causes issues with the emissions systems, the drivability of the engine and the comfort of the passengers. In truly cold weather, most water cooling systems are so efficient that if the coolant flowed through the radiator at startup, the engine would literally never get warm. So this is where the thermostat comes in to play. The thermostat is a small device that normally sits in the system in-line to the radiator. It is a spring-loaded valve actuated by a bimetallic spring. In layman's terms, the hotter it gets, the wider open the valve is. When you start the engine, the thermostat is cold and so it's closed. This redirects the flow of coolant back into the engine and bypasses the radiator completely but because the cabin heater radiator is on a separate circuit, the coolant is allowed to flow through it. It has a much smaller surface area and its cooling effect is nowhere near as great. This allows the engine to build up heat quite quickly. If you look at the first of the two diagrams on the right, you can see the representation of the coolant flow in a cold engine.

As the coolant heats up, the thermostat begins to open and the coolant is allowed to pass out to the radiator where it dumps heat out into the air before returning to the engine block. Once the engine is fully hot, the coolant is at operating temperature and the thermostat is permanently open, redirecting almost all the coolant flow through the radiator. If you look at the second of the two diagrams on the right, you can see the representation of the coolant flow in a cold engine.

It's the action of the thermostat that allows a water-cooled engine to better regulate the heat in the engine block. Unlike an air-cooled engine, the thermostat can dynamically alter the flow of coolant depending on engine load and air temperature to maintain an even temperature.

The radiator fan. In the good old days, car radiators had belt-driven fans that spun behind the radiator as fast as the engine was spinning. The fan is there to draw the warm air away from the back of the radiator to help it to work efficiently. The only problem with the old way of doing it was that the fan ran all the time the engine was running, and stopped when the engine stopped. This meant that the radiator was having air drawn through it at the same rate in freezing cold conditions as it was on a hot day, and when you parked the car, the radiator basically cooked because it had no airflow while it was cooling down. So nowadays, the radiator fan is electric and is activated by a temperature sensor in the coolant. When the temperature gets above a certain level, the fan comes on and because it's electric, this can happen even once you've stopped the engine. This is why sometimes on a hot day, you can park up, turn off, and hear the radiator fan still going. It's also the reason there are big stickers around it in the engine bay because if you park and open the hood to go and start messing with something, the fan might still come on and neatly separate you from your fingers.

The cabin heater. Most water-cooled car engines actually have a second, smaller radiator that the coolant is allowed to flow through all the time for in-car heating. It's a small heat-exchanger in the air vent system. When you select warm air with the heater controls, you will either be allowing the coolant to flow through that radiator via an inline valve in the cooling system (the old way of doing it) or moving a flap to allow the warm air already coming off that radiator to mix in with the cold air from outside.

It's all these combinations and permutations of plumbing in a water-cooled engine that make it so relatively complex. The rendering below shows the basic elements a water-cooled engine.

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Valves and Valve Mechanisms

If you've got this far down the page, hopefully you understand that the valves are what let the fuel-air mixture into the cylinder, and let the exhaust out. Seems simple enough, but there are some interesting differences in the various types of valve mechanism.

Spring-return valves.

Spring return valves are about the most commonly-used and most basic type of valvetrain in engines today. Their operation is simplicity itself and there are only really three variations of the same style. The basic premise here is that the spinning camshaft operates the valves by pushing them open, and valve return springs force them closed. The cam lobes either operate directly on the top of the valve itself, or in some cases, on a rocker arm which pivots and pushes on the top of the valve. The three variations of this type of valve-train are based on the combination of rocker arms (or not) and the position of the camshaft.

The most basic type has the camshaft at the top of the engine with the cam lobes operating directly on the tops of the valves.

The second more complex type still has the camshaft at the top of the engine, but the cam lobes operate rocker arms, which in turn pivot and operate on the tops of the valves. With some of these designs, the rocker arm is pivoted in the middle (as shown below) and with other designed, it's pivoted at one end and the cam lobe operates on it at the midpoint. Think of a fat bloke bouncing in the middle of a diving board whilst the tip of the board hits a swimmer on the head and you'll get the general idea.

The third type which you'll find in some motorcycle engines and many boxer engines are pushrod-activated valves. The camshaft is actually directly geared off the crank at the bottom of the engine and the cam lobes push on pushrods which run up the sides of the engine. The top of the pushrod then pushes on a rocker arm, which finally pivots and operates on the top of the valve. The image here shows the three derivatives in their most basic form so you can see the differences between them. Note that the pushrod type shows the camshaft in the wrong place simply for the purpose of getting it into the image. In reality the camshaft in this system is right at the bottom of the engine near the crank. The rocker arms shown here are also called fingers, or followers depending on who you talk to.

Tappet Valves

Tappet valves aren't really a unique type of valve but a derivative of spring-return valves. For the most part, the direct spring return valve described above wouldn't act directly on the top of the valve itself, but rather on an oil-filled tappet. The tappet is basically an upside-down bucket that covers the top of the valve stem and contains the spring. It's normally filled with oil through a small hole when the engine is pressurised. The purpose of tappets is two-fold. The oil in them helps quiet down the valvetrain noise, and the top of the tappet gives a more uniform surface for the cam lobe to work on. From a maintenance point of view, tappets are the items which wear and are a lot easier to swap out than entire valve assemblies. The image on the left shows a simple tappet valve assembly. I've rendered the tappet slightly transparent so you can see the return spring inside.

Desmodromic Valves

Desmodromic valve systems are unique to Ducati motorbikes. From the Ducati website: The word 'desmodromic' is derived from two Greek roots, desmos (controlled, linked) and dromos (course, track). It refers to the exclusive valve control system used in Ducati engines: both valve movements (opening and closing) are 'operated." Classy, but what does it mean. Well in both the above systems, the closure mechanism on the valve relies on mechanical springs or hydraulics. There's nothing to actually force the valve to close. With the Ducati Desmodromic system, the camshaft has two lobes per valve, and the only spring is there to take up the slack in the closing system. That's right; Ducati valves are forced closed by the camshaft. The marketing people will tell you it's one of the reasons Ducati motorbike engines have been able to rev much higher than their Japanese counterparts. The idea is that with springs especially, once you get to a certain speed, you're bound by the metallurgy of the spring - it can no longer expand to full length in the time between cylinder strokes and so you get 'valve float' where the valve never truly closes. With Desmodromic valves, that never happens because a second closing rocker arm hooks under the top of the valve stem and jams it upwards to force the valve closed. In fact, the stroke length, rods, and pistons all play their part in valve timing and maximum engine speed - it's not just the springs and valve float. This is why F1 cars use such a small stroke and pneumatic valves springs. In truth, both systems, spring or Desmodromic only work well up to a limit. Newer Japanese bikes have engines that can rev to the same limit as a Ducati just using spring-return valves.

You can see the basic layout of a desmodromic valve on the right. As the cam spins, the opening lobe hits the upper rocker arm which pivots and pushes the valve down and open. As the cam continues to spin, the closing lobe hits the lower rocker arm which pivots and hooks the valve back up, closing it. The red return spring is merely there to hold the valve closed for the next cycle and doesn't provide any springing force to the closing mechanism. This is a fairly simple layout for the purposes of illustration. The real engines have Desmo-due and Desmo-quattro valve systems in them where pairs of valves are opened and closed together via the same mechanism.

Quattrovalvole, 16v and the other monikers you'll find on the back of a car.

In the 80's, the buzzword was 16-valve. If you had a 16-valve engine you were happening. You were the dogs bollocks, the cat's meouw. In Italy, your engine was a quattrovalvole. So what the heck does all this mean? Well it's really, really simple. "Traditional" 4-cylinder in-line engines have two valves per cylinder - one intake and one exhaust. In a 16V engine, you have four per cylinder - two intake and two exhaust. (4 valves) x (4 cylinders) = 16 valves, or 16V. It follows that a 20V engine has 20 valves - 5 per cylinder. Normally three intake and two exhaust. Unless you've got a 5-cylinder Audi or Volvo in which case you've still got 4 valves per cylinder. If you're in America, the thing to have now is 32V - a 32 valve engine. Basically it's a V-8 with 4 valves per cylinder. See - it's all just basic maths.

And what do all these extra valves get you apart from a lot more damage if they ever go wrong? A better breathing engine. More fuel-air mix in, quicker exhaust. When you get further down the page (and if your wife / husband hasn't come and complained to you about spending so damn long reading this stuff so late at night), you'll find some more information on why this is A Good Thing.

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