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Car care and maintenance: six tips for teens

Many teens know little or nothing about the basics of auto repair, an AutoMD.com survey finds. Since preventative car maintenance is important for safety, here are easy do-it-yourself auto repair and care tips for teens – and their parents: 

2. Take care of your tires

  • By Ray Cox Contributor

Tire maintenance is particularly important for safe and fuel-efficient driving. Keep your tires properly inflated, and watch for tire wear. Driving on underinflated tires can shorten the life of your tires, increase tire wear, and lead to significant tire damage from heat, potholes, and other road hazards. Keeping your tires inflated to the proper pressure can also improve gas mileage by up to 3.3 percent. Consult your owner's manual or tire sticker on the door jamb for manufacturer-recommended tire pressure settings. Get in the habit of examining your tires for wear and tear every time you stop for gas.

Did you know? You can check for tire wear with a penny. Hold it at the base between your thumb and forefinger so that you can see the top of President Lincoln’s head and the words “In God We Trust.” Place the top of Lincoln’s head into one of the grooves in your tire tread. If any part of Lincoln’s head is covered, you have a legal and safe amount of tire tread left. However, if there is any space above Lincoln’s head, or if you can see any part of the words “In God We Trust,” it’s time for new tires. Click here for more tire care tips.

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Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

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