Underhood Safety
Fixing things on your own car, do it yourself, well it can be very rewarding and you can save a lot of money by doing it. But, there are a lot of ways to get hurt. So there are some safety precautions that you always have to follow. Number one, a lot of late model cars have key fobs like this. They have this little design on it, and that design tells us that this car is equipped with remote start. So you want to make sure you know where both key fobs are before you ever try to do anything on the vehicle to avoid stuff like this. Oh, wouldn't you hate to be in that situation. That could be incredibly dangerous. So always make sure that you know where the key fobs are, and that nobody can get a hold of them while you're working on the vehicle.
The next thing, doing things under the hood, well that's good, but there are a lot things under there that can turn on whether or not the car is running, or the key is even in the ignition. One of those is the electric cooling fan. Now electric cooling fans, they have labels on them, they give you all kinds of warnings and so on, but if you look at this you can see that it could be pretty dangerous if it turned on and your hand was in the way.
So how can you avoid problems? Well the way you avoid problems is by disconnecting the negative, the negative battery cable. But before you do that, here's something that you want. There's different types of these out there. This is the most basic. It uses a nine volt battery, and a plug that plugs into the twelve volt receptacle inside the car, to keep the memory in the computer, and the radio, and all of these things alive, while you're working. That way nothing can go wrong.
You want to protect the car as well, so one of the things you always want to do is have a good high quality fender cover, so you don't scratch the paint or anything like that. But, if you look at what we have here; modern headlights, highly styled. We put the fender cover over it, and we cover the headlight. Well when you do that, if you have a car that has automatic headlights, and you're working inside, the headlights might come on. And if they stay on for more than a couple of minutes, the heat built up under the fender cover can actually melt the headlight. So you never put a fender cover, or anything else, over an operating headlight.