Tiburon Timing Belts for Dummies

Tiburon timing belt routing

It is sometimes instructive to wander through the archived versions of eHow.com posts to see if anyone has commented on the content (in other words, beat us to the punch). Every once in a while we find evidence that other people are thoroughly disgusted by the rubbish some of their freelancers published either out of ignorance or avarice – and perhaps both. Today, we visit a post written by prolific eHowian Abby Vaun that now sits at the niche site ItStillRuns.com. Like so many of the posts at that site, we suspect that anyone ignorant enough to follow the instructions in "How to Replace the Timing Belt on a 2003 Hyundai Tiburon" would soon find that their car did not "still run."

Auto Repair by and for Dummies

Harmonic balancer, small-block Chevy

More than a few of the drones who wrote for... errr, "contributed to" eHow.com were prone to the MSU¹ method of answering the questions as they pretended to be experts. One giveaway for this syndrome is the citation of obscure print books as references instead of linking to something online that a curious (or suspicious) reader could verify. In part, that's why one of our staffers flagged multiple DotD winner "Alibaster Smith"²  for his attempt to tell people "How to Troubleshoot a Harmonic Balancer," which can now be found at ItStillRuns.com.

Two-Cycle Carburetors for Dummies

Two-stroke carburetor

If you, like our founder, got your first driver's license sometime before about 1980, you have almost certainly driven a car with a carburetor. If you car was really "hot," you might have had a two- or even four-barrel "carb." Nowadays, fuel injection rules for motor vehicles, and carburetors now are mostly found on gasoline-powered tools like lawn equipment, generators or compressors. Lawn equipment tends to have two-stroke (aka two-cycle) engines; engines that mix lubricating oil with gasoline instead of having a separate oil reservoir. Sadly, eHowian Alibaster Smith (there's that fake name again!) seems to be completely unaware of the difference between two- and four-cycle engines, which is made obvious in his post "How a 2-Stroke Carburetor Works" at ItStillRuns.com. But, then, we already knew that...

Internal Combustion Engines for Dummies

cutaway view of pistons

We're back mining the mother lode of good ol' eHow today in search of yet another Dumbass of the Day. In this case, we've found a repeat offender. Not only is today's freelancer a Dumbass, the site itself is a paragon of dumbassery. The topic on which Jennifer Fleming held forth is "How to Calculate Compression Ratio and PSI,"¹ but the jackasses of Demand Media file this misinformation under — get this — "Business." Given that misclassification, it's no wonder the topic ended up addressed by someone who wouldn't know an internal combustion engine if it hit her in the butt. Look at what she said to her wide world of readers: