Buying car parts in Cleveland

E-Check applies here

Ohio's emissions programme covers a group of counties in the north-east of the state, and Cleveland is at the centre of them. Most of Ohio is not tested. This is.

On anything from the 1996 model year onward the test reads the OBD-II system rather than sampling the tailpipe, and there are three ways to fail:

1. 1A lit malfunction indicator lamp. Automatic, whatever the car is doing and however well it drives.
2. 2Stored emissions codes, including pending ones.
3. 3Readiness monitors that have not completed. The one people cause themselves.

Readiness monitors are self-tests the engine management runs during normal driving — catalyst efficiency, oxygen sensor response, evaporative integrity. Each needs specific conditions: a particular coolant temperature, a fuel level in a range, a steady speed held for a period, a cold start after a long soak.

Fix the fault, drive a full cycle, check readiness with a scan tool, then go. Most vehicles allow one incomplete monitor and no more.

The components behind the common failures are unglamorous: coils and plugs behind a misfire, oxygen sensors behind fuel-trim and catalyst codes, and on a direct-injection engine the high-pressure pump or the injectors behind a rough-running complaint.

The snow belt

East of the city, cold air crossing Lake Erie picks up moisture and drops it in bands. The snow-belt communities on the higher ground east and south-east of Cleveland receive substantially more snow than the lakefront, and far more than the rest of Ohio.

More snow means a longer treatment season, and a longer treatment season is the whole of the corrosion story:

• Brake lines corroding from the outside under clips, failing when full pressure is applied.
• Caliper slides seizing, wearing one pad and leaving the other.
• Wheel speed sensors bonded into aluminium knuckles.
• Rotor-to-hub corrosion causing runout, felt as a pedal pulsation.
• Structural corrosion at rocker panels and suspension mounting points.

Washing the underside during the winter rather than after it is what actually helps. The damage is done by brine trapped in cavities between storms.

Buy the assembly

In the heaviest-treatment part of Ohio, the removal is the expensive half of every job under the car. A bearing pressed into a corroded knuckle, a strut on a bolt that has bonded into its sleeve, a caliper bracket on ten-year-old fasteners.

So: complete hub assemblies rather than bearings, loaded calipers rather than rebuild kits, complete struts rather than bare dampers, control arms with the joint already in them. The dearer part is usually the cheaper job.

Short winter journeys

Lake-effect weather encourages short, slow trips, and short trips in cold weather never bring an engine to full operating temperature — which is also why readiness monitors take so long to set here. The two problems have the same cause.