Our Daily Beard

So far, no gold. The curs!

My car, Vlad, passed his MOT today after no small amount of effort on the part of my mechanically minded siblings (thanks guys!).

Isn’t having a car great? I was keenly reminded of that fact during the last few days of returning to the medieval world of bus travel.

I really don’t understand cars. This is what I definitely know for sure:

There is an engine, which makes it go.

There are four wheels. As par the cautionary children’s poem ‘The wheels on the bus’, these go round and round.

There is a steering wheel; turning it left makes the car go left, and right does the opposite.

There is a radio for tunez.

There is a gear stick, which is there simply to make sure you’re concentrating.

There’s a button for squirty front and squirty back, to make the glass see-through again.

Petrol goes in. Petrol is car noms.

Also, apparently, water and oil go in. The dipstick is used to see how much oil you have and to prompt sniggering.

 

The follow mechanical aspects of the car are unknown to me (and I suspect to all of Western science). I have attempted to explain them as well as possible.

How petrol makes the car go. I theorise that, like in a human stomach, petrol contains important nutrients that the car absorbs in some kind of acid chamber. The car then has lots of energy that whooshes off to the wheels.

Steering. I think the lefty-righty motion of the wheel turns the car’s wheels by transmitting a signal through a chain gang of cows. This is why it’s called ‘steering’, because there’s just loads of little steers inside the car and when you turn it left, the steer on the left says ‘psst, left’. The messages goes down the line until the steer by the wheels tells them what to do. When I go the wrong way, e.g. when trying to park, I attribute it to a case of Chinese whispers.

How the gears work. Okay, here’s my theory. The gears have to be different because the wheels are always spinning around and they lose count of how fast they should be going. So you put the car in first gear and the wheels know they need to go about ten miles per hour. Then to go past twenty you need second gear. Basically, it’s the gear + 10. Third handles 30+, fourth for 40+. Wheels can’t count above five so fifth just does everything over fifty.

Finally, I don’t really understand road signs, road laws, road rules or roads.

So if anyone does know how to ‘do’ a car ‘stuff’ then please enlighten me with a drawing, preferably crayon.

Cheers!

[sociable]