Tires help you stop when they can actually grip the road – so for the love of all that is holy get proper snow ones. Brakes make your tires actually stop, so you’ll need those first. Fresh wipers assist you in seeing what it is you’re braking in front of. And a solid battery makes sure you’re not stuck in the cold trying to start your car to no avail. These all seem like good things to us.

Many of these items are easy to replace on your own, or any shop such as an ACDelco professional service center can help. ACDelco comes as original equipment for all GM cars, and they can get you winter prepped and on the salty roads in the time it takes you to set up your dating profile on that hot new site you heard about during your office holiday party…

And once it is set up, your new date will be impressed that you are capable of piloting your sweet ride through the winter hellscape while all the other jabronies on the road are sliding around like 2-ton figure skaters. Now THAT is a good first impression…

This is a sponsored conversation written by me on behalf of ACDelco. The opinions and text are all mine.

The post Isn’t it about time you prep your car for winterpocolypse? appeared first on FactoryTwoFour.

Automobiles are inherently mobile, and increasingly they contain equipment that would commonly be considered computing devices… Many of the ECUs embodied in today’s motor vehicles are carefully calibrated to satisfy federal or state regulatory requirements with respect to emissions control, fuel economy, or vehicle safety. Allowing vehicle owners to add and remove programs at whim is highly likely to take vehicles out of compliance with these requirements, rendering the operation or re-sale of the vehicle legally problematic. The decision to employ access controls to hinder unauthorized “tinkering” with these vital computer programs is necessary in order to protect the safety and security of drivers and passengers and to reduce the level of non-compliance with regulatory standards. We urge the Copyright Office to give full consideration to the impacts on critical national energy and environmental goals, as well as motor vehicle safety, in its decision on this proposed exemption. Since the record on this proposal contains no evidence regarding its applicability to or impact on motor vehicles, cars and trucks should be specifically excluded from any exemption that is recommended in this area.

To put that very simply, because you COULD do wrong or evil by modifying your car, you shouldn’t be allowed to do it; because you can kill with a hammer, you are no longer allowed to buy one; and because we made this hammer so complicated, any modification of it would make it a weapon not a hammer. Under their proposed reading of the law, you own your car but not the software that runs it. And while this is terrifying in-of-itself, it has far reaching consequences for all other devices that come with firmware preloaded. Your washing machine? Nope, you don’t own that either. Your television? Still belongs to Sony. Your microwave? I guess we’ll let you keep using it for now…

As word is spreading about this proposed change, the Electronic Frontier Foundation and others are circulating a petition to add an exemption to the DMCA to allow people and independent shops to work on cars, and I encourage everyone to sign it.

The post It Could Soon Be Illegal To Work on Your Car appeared first on FactoryTwoFour.

What I do know is that Mothers hooked us up with their NuLens Headlight Renewal Kit so we could test it out. I’ve always been pretty skeptical of these kinds of kits ever since they first started appearing a few years ago. But we here at FactoryTwoFour are men of science, so we rounded up an old Honda with beat-up lenses and got to testing.

Our mule is a 2004 CR-V with fairly, but not extremely, faded and scratched lenses. Mothers’ kit is pretty straight forward. You tape off the area to protect the bodywork paint, then attach the spongy buffing dome to a cordless drill. Dribble on a nickel-sized dot of the restoration compound and get buffing. Even if you take it easy with the RPMs, there will be fine compound splatter sent all over. All. Over. Don’t have a nicely washed vintage car parked next to the vehicle you’re working on. Ask me how I now.

I didn’t think the damage or yellowing to the Honda’s headlights were all that bad, so I was surprised when the buffing wheel and compound didn’t make that much of a difference. It looked ever-so-slightly shiny-er, but still very faded. Luckily, the Mothers kit included additional options for “highly-damaged” lights. If our Honda’s lights count as highly damaged, woe be unto you if your headlights are so far gone they look like yellow fog lamps.

For severely scratched lenses, Mothers provides three graduating sanding discs – 800, 1500, and 3000 grit. The process is much the same as the buffing ball, save for now you are wet sanding so now you need to keep a solid film of water on the lens as you sand away all the pits and scratches.

Going from disc to disc, the Honda’s headlights got worse (because now I’m scratching away whole layers of plastic) to just generally hazy all over with the 3000 grit. Now its back to the soft buffing ball to finish off. Did it work?

You know, it actually did. I had my doubts, but after the full restoration process, the lenses were left pretty near perfect and smooth. I definitely and completely recommend picking up the Mothers headlight restoration kit if your headlights are looking a bit yesteryear. All in, both lamps took me about 2 hours, but that included camera set up and testing on different portions of the lens. If you dive right in, you should have new headlights in about an hour. Then your car will look brand new again, and valets will stop pretending their lot is “full.”

The post Do Headlight Restorers Work? Let’s Find Out! appeared first on FactoryTwoFour.