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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: 

5. Take care of your windshield

  • By Ray Cox Contributor

The windshield is like the eye of your car. Therefore, it is critical to keep it clean and clear for safe driving. Some parts of the country are, or will be, experiencing their first rainfalls after months of being dry. You don’t want to discover that your windshield wiper blades don’t work during the first rainfall when you need them most. Wiper blades with cracks – or that skip, streak or leave spots or smears – should be replaced. You should also check spray nozzles for proper aim. If the nozzles are clogged, you can clean them out with a needle. Use windshield washer fluid in the tank to prevent corrosion and remove stubborn dirt, grime, and insects from your windshield. Whether it rains or not, you should try to use your spray nozzles and wiper blades every few weeks to keep them functioning properly.

Did you know? Carrying a squeegee with a scrubber in your car or trunk is a good idea. It can help remove splattered bugs, and maximize visibility.

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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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