Tuneups for Dummy Dodge Owners

Dodge 3.3 liter V6

Performed a tune-up on your car lately? Neither has anyone around the Antisocial Network, at least not since the early 1980s. That's about the last time anyone with an arm that only bends one way could reach the spark plugs on most engines. It's pretty clear that eHow.com's Lina Schofield hasn't done a tune-up since then, either – and, more likely, has never tuned up an engine. If you were to read her instructions in "How to Tune Up a Dodge 3.3 Liter Engine,"¹ you'd figure it out pretty quickly, just like we did. 

Lina starts out with a bang. From the very first, her ignorance is on display:

"Every vehicle should have a tuneup after each 36,000 miles to ensure proper function of the engine..."

Well, no: the maintenance interval varies from vehicle to vehicle, with many Asian makers telling you to change the plugs every 100,000 miles. But we digress... Lina continues by telling us that an oil change is part of a tune-up (it's not, technically speaking), but that doesn't stop her from telling us to

"Pull the oil filler cap out of the right side of the engine compartment. Place the drip pan underneath the oil drain plug below your vehicle and then unplug it with the socket. Take the oil filter out with the oil filter wrench, the filter sits in front of the oil pan. Set the new oil filter in its place, secure the filter manually. Fill the oil filler cap with new oil and replace the cap. Close up the plug by putting it back on with the socket wrench."

That's just so wrong, in so many ways. "...unplug it with [a] socket"? "...Fill the oil filler cap"? We're not even sure we'd let this moron drive our car, much less tune it up! But the worst instructions this total incompetent published are those for changing spark plugs - the main reason why someone would even ask how to tune up a Dodge 3.3 engine...

"Find your spark plugs attached to the side of the engine. Remove the spark plug wire from the first spark plug sitting nearest you. Exchange this spark plug for a new plug by pushing it down. Click in one end of the wire in the spark plug top, connect the other end into the ignition coil or distributor. Replace each spark plug one at a time. Follow this procedure for all of your spark plugs and wires." Holy moley, is that paragraph complete and utter bull or what? She thinks spark plugs are "attached to the side of the engine"? that you change a spark plug by "pushing it down"? Heaven forbid that the compression in the engine might "push it up"!

We found instructions online for replacing the plugs in this engine, and it's darned near impossible to reach the spark plugs on the back of this transverse-mounted V6 – but this dumbass just says "...Replace each spark plug one at a time"? We'll admit that, like Lina, we've never tuned up a Dodge 3.3, but here's a guy who has – and it's just a little more complicated than this money-grubbing freelancer suggests.

And you wonder why we call Lina Schofield our Dumbass of the Day... not.

¹ The original has been deleted by Leaf Group, but can still be accessed using the Wayback machine at archive.org. The URL was    ehow.com/how_7520202_tune-dodge-33-liter-engine.html

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DD - ENGINES