10 Tips for Preparing Your Car for Winter
Temperatures are dropping all over North America and in some parts of the United States and Canada, snow has already fallen. In the next few weeks, there will be more snowfall across the northern half of the continent, leading to slippery streets and overall poor driving conditions, often in a cold car that is covered with snow.
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The Best Heated Seat Covers for Your Car
If you live in an area that experiences freezing temperatures in the winter, you can appreciate the effect of the best heated seat covers for your car. Getting into a cold car with cold seats on a 0 degree morning is a harsh way to start the morning. Even if you start the car in advance to let it warm up a bit, the seats often hold in the cold, creating an uncomfortable situation for the early portion of your morning commute.
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Classic Car Restoration: 10 Things You Need to Know
Classic car restoration is a very broad term that can mean almost anything, depending who you ask. Deciding what it means to you is crucial to making sure your restoration project goes smoothly and doesn’t end up as a never-finished pile of parts.
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Best All Season Tires
Tires, like donuts, are round with a hole in the middle. Unlike donuts, picking tires can be hard. You can’t just go back the next day and grab another one if you don’t like them. Rather than filling your hunger, tires keep you safe and secure on the road in all types of conditions, both wonderful and miserable. While there are tires designed for summer and tires for winter, for many people, the compromise of an all-season tire is a much better choice. Like a plain donut, the all-season tire is good every day, even if it isn’t your favorite.
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Best Jeep Tires: Jeep Thrills
There’s no question the Jeep brand has been on a bit of a roll. After launching the new Wrangler a couple of model years ago, they followed that up with the similar-but-really-not Gladiator and are set to (finally) have a three-row offering in the new year. Combine that with volume from the Cherokees – both Grand and un-Grand – plus the Renegade, and FCA essentially has a license to print money.
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Best Tail Light Bulbs: Get the Dim Out
Scattered amongst all the commerce posts you’ve read on this and other sites about ZOMG PRIME DAY DEALS featuring a wide array of products are lists like this one, focused on a single type of car part that you’re not likely to think about until its actually needed.
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Best Lug Nuts: Deez Nuts
Your car’s lug nuts are a lot like your car’s insurance policy – doing its job in silence, not thought of until needed, and cursed upon failure. They are also, like your author, routinely ignored. There is a buying demographic for aftermarket lug nuts, however, a group that mostly includes people trying to spruce up a used car or hapless DIYers who stepped on the hubcap during a tire change and sent the OEM lugs flying into oblivion.
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Best Windshield Repair Kits: Pane in the Glass
You’re on the way home from work, minding your own business, when *bang* that service truck you’ve been following for the last 10 miles flicks up a rock which impacts yer car’s windshield. Great; just great (let’s see if I can get the TNG clip timing right this time).
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Best Fuel Filters: Fuelish Behavior
This is a slightly difficult list since virtually every vehicle on the road takes a different type of fuel filter. Unless you’re driving a GM product from the ’90s; experience shows they all used roughly the same one from about 1990 until about 2008. Also, know that there typically aren’t service intervals for the replacement of these things – generally, when they go bad, you know.
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Best Brake Caliper Paints: Them's the Brakes
For those of us unable or unwilling to make monthly payments to an OEM overlord, preventing us from ordering a car exactly as we’d like it from the factory, turning to the aftermarket sates our desire for owning a vehicle that’s a bit different than all the others that left the factory. Beats turning to illicit substances, I suppose.
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Best Wheel Cleaning Brushes: Wheely Clean
If you tend to skip over our DIY post weeks, perhaps this one will be more to your liking. While not everyone wants or has the space to wrench on their own ride, there’s a solid chance that most gearheads like to have a few cleaning tools on hand.
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Best Spark Plug Sockets: The Gappening
Continuing the recent trend of DIY tools, we’ve selected spark plug sockets as today’s list of choices. While not all of us set gaps and fiddle with old fashioned points systems, there’s a solid chance most of our readers have had cause to throw a new set of plugs in their beater at some point or another.
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Best Oil Drain Pans: Greasy Situation
If you followed our advice about socket sets and garage door openers, you’re well on your way to dabbling in a bit of automotive DIY. A good place to start? The simple oil change. Since oil is the lifeblood of your car, it’s an excellent idea to understand why it’s important to change it regularly.
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Best Garage Door Openers: Open Wide
Hands up if you’ve ever toiled on a car behind creaky garage doors with enough gap in the seals to let in heat during summer and snow during winter. Actually, a solid number of us have likely changed engines or replaced fenders curbside or in the parking lot of AutoZone. Ok, replaced wipers and batteries, at least.
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Best Garage Seats: Wheely Good Idea
It’s unfortunate the word ‘creeper’ has a different connotation in the Internet era. Anyone saying “Do you want to see my new creeper?” or “I crushed my old creeper and put it in the dumpster,” will likely receive a visit from the gendarmes in short order. At the very least, the FBI will be watching your texts for a couple of weeks.
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Best Racing Seats: Have a Seat
It is freely admitted a bit of help was enlisted for this post. After all, your author does not generally purchase items for his daily driver that intentionally make it less comfortable, except for the U-Cheap-OutTM suspension kit he once purchased (best to gloss over that one).
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Best Wheel Bearing Greases: Just Keep Rollin'
We’re confident a good many of you saw this viral video in which a tire and wheel assembly seemed to warp in from another dimension to clobber someone’s front porch at speed. Pick your favorite part of the video (there’s plenty) – the assembly itself tearing down a rural highway at a tremendous clip, the fact it actually rang the doorbell after impacting the home, or the guy in orange shorts who shows up after the destruction and stands there in complete befuddlement.
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Best Radiator Flushes: Feeling Flushed
There’s solid evidence in the comment section of this august publication that we (the collective we, which includes readers and authors) have held the keys to a horrible car or two at some point in their automotive career. A quick headcount in the official TTAC Slack chat reveals humans with a propensity to own decrepit Miata convertibles and Lincoln coupes alike.
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Best Car Waxes: Wax On, Wax Off
The title for this post is as predictable as your author’s propensity to fix himself a bacon sandwich at dinnertime. All the same, we’re betting you lot tend to take care of your cars, so an article about car wax should be useful.
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Best Spark Plugs: Sparking Your Interest
It has been ages since the days when one needed to change the spark plugs in their car every 20,000 miles. Today’s machines are very different, to the point where most owners have no idea the firing order of the engine that’s powering them down the road. Still, plugs do need to be replaced eventually, even if it is at 100k.
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Best LED Fog Lamps: Mist the Mark
Tacking extra lights onto one’s vehicle is a practice nearly as old as the concept of the automobile itself. After all, you know better than the cadre of engineers who worked for ages designing the thing, right?
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Best Socket Sets: Sock It To Ya
We’ve covered mechanic’s sets in the past but, in this updated post, we are going to focus on dedicated socket sets. That means no sets with piece-count padders like Allen keys in an obscure size or that one tool that only serves to remove the Färhfvingenator on your clapped-out Volkswagen.
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Best Options for Garage Shelving: Leader of the Pack Rat
There’s a general understanding amongst gearheads that no matter how big one’s garage or storage space, it’ll eventually fill up. A two car garage will be just as full as a single, while that 40’ x 40′ unit your neighbor is building will be filled to capacity by year’s end. It’s just the natural order of things.
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Best Engine Flushes: Feeling Flushed
We’ll preface this post with the admonition that, unless you’re reasonably familiar with the environs of an engine bay, you should keep your paws off stuff like this. However, a case can be made that anyone who’s fleet is comprised of machines that actually need these products is probably intimately familiar with the contents of a rusty toolbox.
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Best Car Polishes: Shine Factory
Yes, yes – we’ve talked about this subject and the related topic of ceramic coatings in the past. We promise we’re not repeating ourselves, at least not until we’re safely ensconced in the Old Age Home for Recovering Gearheads. We’ll be in the wing where they keep folks who had an odd affinity for terrible ’90s GM cars, like the Oldsmobile Toronado Troféo.
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Best Phone Mounts: Can You Hear Me Now?
We know, without a doubt, there are several readers in the audience shouting into their screens that few people use a phone mount these days. One’s phone generally stays in a pocket or unceremoniously flung into storage bin or cupholder. And, yeah, you’ve got a point.
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Street Rod: The Granddaddy of Car Culture Software
While the summer months are normally the perfect time to take a road trip, New York has mandated that any jaunts out of state require a 14-day quarantine upon return — and any location one might want to visit on a lark has a strong likelihood of being closed to visitors.
Seems like a lot of hassle with very little payoff for yours truly, so I’ve been escaping into old films and television shows before they’re cancelled for being offensive. Video games have also become a staple of the modern pandemic lifestyle and, if you read my review of the Ford Simulator franchise, you’ll recall that my tastes skew toward terrible, automotive-themed DOS programs from the late 1980s.
Today’s entry is actually pretty decent, however — or at least it would have been at the time of its release.
Best Antifreeze: That's Cool
Maintaining your out-of-warranty ride often forces us to learn the different systems in our vehicles. After wrenching on them for interminable amounts of time, knowing the ins and outs of the braking system or suspension bits is kind of inevitable.
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Best Ceramic Coatings: Big Shiny Cars
There’s an urban myth amongst gearheads that a clean car runs better. Whether or not it’s true, we can’t say. However, why take that chance? Best to keep your ride in spic-n-span shape.
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Best Multimeters: Volt of Lightning
Whether you’re working on a collector car or a daily beater, having a multimeter on hand when one’s required can be a lifesaver. Not only can it help diagnose electrical issues but it can also help narrow down issues and prevent the replacement of perfectly good parts.
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Best Oil Filters: Engine Protections
There are some things best enjoyed without filters – Instagram photos, discussions about pay with your boss, and those Camel cigarettes from the ’80s. What definitely does require a filter is the oiling system on your car’s engine. We’ve gathered a few of them here.
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Best Cordless Drills: You Know the Drill
There will be a few in our readership who are going to immediately point out that cordless drills aren’t strictly an automotive tool or accessory. And, for once, they’re technically correct. The first genre one generally thinks of when an ad for cordless drills appears is the construction industry. An maybe the props department for a science-fiction B-movie.
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Best Welding Gloves: Just Glovely
Following up our list about welding helmets we felt it appropriate to compile a list of welding gloves. After all, you’re not trying to stick metal together with your bare hands are you? And that pair of cotton gloves is totally inadequate, by the way.
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Best Welding Helmets: Agents of Shield
Given the general propensity for most of our readership (and authors) to drive horrible but charming rotboxes, there’s an excellent chance that at least some of you have welded together a piece of metal or two in order to keep your heap on the road.
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Best Garage Work Lights: Bright Stuff
It’s a safe bet that most DIYers are grateful to the wrenching deities for the democratization of LED illumination – especially when talking about work lights. Your author used to toil under cars and in tight spaces with incandescent work lights that heated themselves to approximately the surface of the sun, as I’m sure you all did as well.
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Best Convertible Car Seats: Safety First
It’s all well and good to reminisce about the good old days but, chances are, we’re looking at another time through seriously tinted rose-colored glasses. Sure, more than a few of us used to bounce around on the bench seat of a station wagon or in the bed of a pickup truck but there’s no way anyone can argue in good faith that it was very safe.
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Best Rust Converters and Removers: Rid the Iron Oxide
Before you get bent out of shape, know that this post isn’t about those infernal gadgets that late-night television tries to sell us. You know the ones – they promise to send an electric charge through the body of a vehicle to allegedly neutralize conditions in which rust normally forms. The less said about those, the better.
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Best Tool Bags: In the Bag
There are occasions when a sturdy canvas or cloth tool bag is handier than a cumbersome metal toolbox. Hitting a bump with the latter in your trunk or truck box results in a crashing sound not heard since the implosion of The Sands nearly 25 years ago.
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Best Electric Pressure Washers: Under Pressure
It’s totally not a filled-with-soap myth that a clean car runs better, right? Except for off-road rigs. They run best when caked with a thick layer of sticky mud and dirt.
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Best Mechanic's Gloves: Fits Like A …
Quick – what’s the first thing you reach for when starting any DIY project? No, it isn’t the perpetually absent 10mm socket, nor is it a quarter for the swear jar. It is, most likely a good pair of gloves.
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Best Tire Shines: Rise 'n Shine
Hands up if your spouse has ever stood in the with a perplexed look as you applied tire shine to the ride-on lawnmower. Anyone? No? Well, I guess it’s just me and my fanaticism for clean machinery, then.
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Best Tool Boxes: Organize This
It’s a debate for the ages: should one put tools back in their place during a repair? One school of thought says that if you don’t, then they’re at hand and easy to reach. Others argue that the time spent walking back to the bench is well spent since you always know exactly where the tools are sitting. We’ll let you guess which side of the debate this author resides.
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Best Dog Car Harnesses: Who's a Good Boy
We’ll preface this post with the note that your humble author has never, and likely will never, have any canine livestock in his home. But plenty of people do, while continuing to maintain their gearhead status, explaining the presence of today’s list.
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Best Steering Wheel Locks: No Theft Turn
Let’s get something clear right from the start: these locks are best thought of as a deterrent to the scourge that is vehicle theft and not an outright prevention tool. If two identical cars are parked side by each, one with a steering wheel lock and one without, there’s a good chance the robber is going to target the one sans lock.
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Best Bed Liners for Pickups: Liner Notes
Most dealerships will, as a rule, install a bed liner of some sort in the back of every single new pickup they park on the lot. Whether one agrees with this propping up of the parts department usually depends on which side of the financial ledger one resides.
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Best Bug and Tar Removers: Don't Bug Me
There’s a marked difference between having to wash a car and wanting to wash a car. The former is a chore that is assigned to sullen teens in the wash bays of countless car dealers across the nation. The latter is a task enjoyed by gearheads on a Sunday afternoon.
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Best Electric Car Jacks: Offer a Lift
Most of us reading (and writing for) this website either own or have had several terrible hoopties in their fleet at one point or another. In what seems like another lifetime on this site, Jack Baruth once opined that you gotta be rich to own a cheap car and, like it or not, the man had a point. Owning a beater or project car is usually – nay, always – an exercise in spending sums of cash far beyond the original purchase price.
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Best Car Lifts for a Home Garage: Chrome, Lift You Up
If the garage floor coverings we profiled the other day are aspirational, then these in-house car lifts represent the culmination of most gearheads’ dreams. Whether you’re in the market for one of these things in order to increase the amount of storage in your garage or you’re actually going to use it for repair duties, a lift is the gold standard to which most of us with gasoline in our veins aspire. Lifting that chrome-bedecked collector car skyward to perform a repair or carry out an inspection is something that fills the dreams of most car nuts.
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Best Automotive Battery Testers: All Juiced Up
Whether it’s a prized collector car or simply your daily beater, twisting the key (or pushing the button) only to come up with a fistful of no-go thanks to a dead battery is a deeply disappointing moment. Who left those devices plugged into the always-on 12V socket again?
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Best Torque Wrenches: Crank That
If you’re doing any sort of DIY work that requires the removal and installation of nuts and bolts, a torque wrench is a great tool to have on hand. This is doubly true if you have a propensity for swapping the wheels and tires of your vehicle. Properly torquing those lug nuts is critical to avoid a potentially calamitous situation.
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Best Baby Mirrors for Cars: I See You
Snicker at this topic if you must, but since we’re no longer allowed to let youngsters roll around in the cargo area of a station wagon like a sack of potatoes, the available number of safety items available for parents to buy has multiplied exponentially. Infants are now strapped into rear-facing car seats that essentially become part of the car’s structure when properly installed.
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Best Racing Footwear: Hot Shoes for Hotshoes
Sure, the last time you wore a pair of racing shoes to a party you were endlessly made fun of by your gearhead buddies. Hey, man, what can we say? They’re just jealous of your lap times, that’s all.
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Best Hot Wheels Track Sets: All In Good Fun
Be forewarned. The following items are gateways to a lifelong cycle of fiduciary entanglement. It’s not drugs, crime, or even rooting for the Lions. No, it’s something far worse.
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The Best Gifts for Gearheads: TTAC's 2020 Holiday Gift Guide
When it comes to the holiday shopping season, this year may be a bit different. And you may be celebrating holidays virtually. So with that in mind, here are some gift ideas for the gearhead in your life — including ones you can ship. Happy shopping!
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Best Head-Up Displays: Heads Up, Man
Not much of the driving advice doled out by my long-suffering father has been retained by your author’s increasingly foggy brain. Gripping the wheel at ten-and-two has been replaced by nine-and-three, although dad’s exhortation that my preferred wheel grip of twelve-and-nothing was absolute bollocks brings a smile to my face even now.
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Best Tow and Recovery Straps: When Sand Jobs Require Tow Jobs
Heading out into the sand — or any off-road environment — is bound to bring a fun-filled day with the chance of scattered calamity. The old saw advises that if you didn’t get stuck during your sojourn to the desert or mud pit, you weren’t trying hard enough.
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Best Clay Bars: Clay Time
Many gearheads are firm believers that a clean car runs better than a dirty one. While there is only anecdotal evidence from which to draw a conclusion about this, it cannot be denied that a clean car is worth more at trade-in time or when pulling up to the curb for your Tinder date.
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Best Car Paint Protection Films: Film at 11
Far beyond the reaches of old-school car bras and hood protectors are these clear paint protection films. Targeted at drivers who give a damn about their car’s paintwork, these options are dandy ways to keep a vehicle’s finish in good shape while not hiding anything under a leather protector.
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Best Car Organizers: Everything In Its Place
Hey, you. Yeah, you with the landfill masquerading as a car. It’s time to clean it up and get organized. Having a spot in which to store all the detritus of daily life is important. It’s even more important to keep it in reach of the ankle biters unless you really like stopping every five minutes to find the juice boxes. Heck, even those of us who travel solo can use a bit of help keeping things in the car at bay.
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Best Steam Cleaners for Car Detailing: Full Steam Ahead
Every single gearhead reading this enjoys a clean car. Whether we take the time to actually remove life’s various and sundry detritus, well, that’s a different story. We all know people whose engine compartments are tidier than their passenger compartments.
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