OK, maybe I’m old-fashioned.
Maybe I’m a bit nerdy.
Maybe I’m biased.
Maybe I’m out of touch.
But, am I crazy to think that a couple of 19-year-old boys should know what a “cylinder” is when talking about cars? I recently sold my 1995 Altima to a kid who stopped and asked if I wanted to sell it. I told him that yes, I was interested in selling it, but I explained to him that a) it had a bad cylinder (no compression) and b) was unlikely to pass emissions because of it. They (he had a friend with him) looked at me blankly and said “what’s a ‘cylinder’?”
Now, ignoring for the moment that I just think it’s good practice to know something about the devices one uses (like computers), the term “cylinder” is used all the time - almost ever car commercial says something like “turbo-charged 4-cylinder engine.” Do people just tune that out, or ignore it?
So, am I wrong to think people should know what this means?
I find it hard to imagine someone that didn’t at least know a piston and cylinder powers the engine. Isn’t that covered in 7th grade science? I’m pretty sure we covered compression in science class. Defined horsepower.
I’m glad that didn’t stop you from selling to the little snot. Seriously. You warned him, he said ‘Ruh?’. I think you satisfied both your legal and moral obligations there.
A cylinder is a geometric object consisting of a column of 3 dimensional space at most a fixed perpendicular distance away from a circle, but that’s not important right now.
Cars today are so reliable that an owner might only rarely or never pop the hood, change the oil or even change a tire. So I can understand a teenager not being familiar with an IC engine.
I know it’s part of a car’s engine too, but if you told me a car had a “bad cylinder” I wouldn’t know exactly what that meant in terms of seriousness and cost of repair. I have a vague cartoon picture in my head of a car’s engine with pistons and such, but if one is “bad” I don’t know what that means. Less efficient? Will the car still run? Will it cough out fumes? Flames? No clue.
Yeah, I’m with Antigen on this. I can check my oil, pump my gas, and change an air filter, but beyond that, I’m pretty much gonna let the experts (or my stepdad) handle it. I have a limited amount of room in my brain for knowledge, and the specifics of what a “bad cylinder” will do to my car just didn’t make the cut.
What do you mean by a bad cylinder? Does it just need rings or has it soft seized? Has it had the heads done before? Are we talking oversized piston or a resleeve?
-Mike, owner of many motorcycles including a BMW airhead and therefore all too, nay Painfully aware of what a cylinder is.
I just noticed something the other day on facebook. On a page where people remember the “good old days” in my town, I found that lots of guys, middle aged and up, were actually known by the cars they drove: “Frankie with the Vette,” “the Corvair guys,” etc.
And I realized that none of these kids today are going to be known that way. The “car culture” is fading away and it’s mostly kept alive by old guys going to cruise nights.
