These Are A Few Of My Favorite Springs

The suspension of a car is a simple system when compared to the those things related to the drivetrain, and because of this steering just gets lumped in with it in tests and diagnostics. When most people think of suspension a picture of a shock comes to mind: a sausage shaped piece of metal that is bolted on somewhere between a wheel and the frame of a vehicle. When air shocks and struts became standard on cars, the terminology began confusing owners and students alike. Throw a random name like McPhearson Strut out there and a sizeable portion of shade-tree mechanics threw in the towel on performing their own repairs due to terminilogical complexity. The truth is that the shock hasn't evolved all that much through the years. By itself it can be described sa an oil filled cannister that is contained by a couple of rubber seals. When the car goes over a bump (more unused terminology here) it jounces and rebounds...or goes up and down. The oil inside the shock has a finite ability to compress and this is what keeps the car from chattering down the street, the absorbsion of a road's hills and valleys into the cannister and away from the frame.

The simple shock still exists en masse with trucks and SUVs that are weighty and require regular shock replacement. But suspension is more than just shocks. There are control arms and drag links, sway bars and ball joints. However, the recipe does not get any more complex. These items absorb impact at the wheel, behind the wheel or simply keep the wheel on the ground.

Steering is more complex, especially with its ever-evolving engineering. It seems hard to believe, but there are still many newer cars that do not have power steering, an advancement that changed drivers from a handful of decent parallel-parkers to a whole contigent. Most cars do have this feature and this system's expansive conflagration of squirrely pressure and return lines, coolers and filters, racks and linkage, pumps and pulleys make it a fantastic money-maker for repair shops across the land. The adoption of drive by wire or computer-controlled power steering will expand this repair work well beyond the scope of any at-home mechanic with a Craftsman set of wrenches and a clean garage with a couple of floor jacks.

Although not as quickly as the internet or cell phones, the automotive world is expanding at a rapid pace and the heavy tome we were instructed to buy when our class began had already become outdated. We were trying as hard as we could to understand things that were not that hard to grasp. Meanwhile, outside our doors, the world moved on in such a way that the small slice of students that would actually complete their courses would be eating the dust of improvements that had come and gone.