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A golf cart is zipping up the fairway, bouncing and jouncing towards the 18th green. The 19th hole, the club bar, is so close. You’re licking your lips in anticipation of a cold beer when the golf cart battery dies. It looks like your mates will beat you to the bar. Let’s rewind time a little, let’s see why the electric cart’s battery up-and-die prematurely.

Engaging the T.L.C Approach

Tempted to pull out your trusty putter and go to town on the betrayer, you take a few moments to calm down. Instead of calling the insentient power brick a whole slew of unpleasant names, you decide to change your ways. The battery is put on charge regularly, it’s cleaned, and a fine layer of petroleum jelly is liberally applied to the battery terminals. Those terminals gain chemical gunk over time, and the pasty stuff can interfere with the power distributing components, so a scheduled clean and protective coating will soon correct that nasty issue for you.

Select a Capable Battery Charger

Some electrical knowledge is required to get the best out of the next few lines of instructional text. First off, don’t use any old battery charger. A fully-featured model is best. Equipped with essential charge optimizing features, like an automatic over and undercharging prevention circuit, branded equipment options are designed to extend and enhance battery life. To select the right model, look for a golf cart recommendation table. On finding this little selection chart, the right battery charger is intelligently matched against a range of compatible golf buggies. With less time spent feeding off of the charging dock, your sporty little electric cart will spend more time conquering the golf course.

Buckling Down On the Maintenance Work

As an outdoor pastime, golf is a fun way of staying fit. Still, who wants to spend the best part of the day hiking their way between the various holes? Already, the new battery charger is working to increase the life expectancy of your battery by a fifth. Let’s fine tune the maintenance work even further so that your day is spent whacking golf balls, not walking down long fairways. Take the slab-like power brick, check its fluid level each month, and top its cells with distilled water. Remember, away from a coastal links course, the temperatures can soar, and batteries dry faster under the sun.

Last of all, a little common sense goes a long way. Avoid steep inclines, if possible. Seek out flatter routes. Now, with a battery maintenance kit and this article nearby, you’ll always be on time for the 19th, right at the end of the bar with your thirsty golfing mates.

Aluminium really is an amazing boat trailer materials. Due to the alloy’s substantial weight-to strength coefficient, this metal is light but strong. That’s a feature every boat owner knows and loves. Even if the tow car is a compact, not a brawny pickup truck, the job gets done. With the boat and trailer in tow, the car cruises towards a lake edge.

Aluminium Boat Trailers Cruise

A safely cradled boat is waiting to cruise the open waters. Meanwhile, its boat trailer is showing off its own cushioned kilometre eating capabilities. Thanks to the lightweight but durable trailer metal, the moderately muscled vehicle engine climbs steep grades and brakes easily at the bottom of fast-dropping hills. The boat is fairly heavy, but it’s also made of lightweight aluminium, so the mass isn’t unmanageable. Paired with the weight of the trailer, a relatively powerful vehicle engine can handle the majority of road rises and falls, plus the twists and turns that necessitate a responsive steering wheel.

A Clear Non-Freshwater Winner

Boat trailers should be corrosion resistant. Now, many alternative metals are rust resistant, but that feature isn’t exactly reliable. More than rust resistant, modern aluminium boat trailers are comprehensively rustproof. Even an ordinary trailer, coated in aluminium oxide, resists water oxidization. For a level of oxidization proofing that’s hard to beat, places where coastal waters dominate, briny salt water corrosion is far more caustic. In this scenario, a top-tier aluminium trailer assures a rust-free boating experience.

Aesthetically Pleasing Mariner Cradles

Even if the thin aluminium oxide coating gets a scratch, the metal only scores slightly while it develops a light coating of white powder. The white powder even acts as a self-healing feature, so a new aluminium oxide film takes form as the trailer ages. Now, with the protective coating and weight-to-strength ratio working in concert, the boat cradle retains its good looks. That’s something that can’t be said for steel. Unless that alloy is heavily zinc-galvanized, it’ll age and develop an ugly yellow-brown bloom. Finally, with aluminium performing as the base material for the boat and its trailer, galvanic corrosion can never be a worry. With steel and other ferrous-rich metals, that’s a promise that can’t be kept. Plastics are an option, of course, but plastics wear faster than aluminium, which is a durable metal.

Indeed, modern aluminium alloys are closing the durability gap. They’re still not as hard or as rigid as stainless steel or galvanized metals, but they’re more than hard enough to serve as a durable boat trailer frame. In and out of saltwater, speeding down the highways and byways behind a moderately powerful towing vehicle, aluminium boat trailers are simply the best, and that’s a fact.

Whether a boating enthusiast is replacing an old outboard engine or he’s buying an entirely new craft, there are some elementary engine differences he should know about right off the bat. The differences between two-stroke and four-stroke outboards, and there are major differences, are one example of fundamental boating knowledge. So, if there are still doubts about those alternating engine architectures, here’s where we clear up the matter. 

The Telling Differences: Two-Stroke Outboard Motors

Folk tend to make sweeping generalizations when they talk about the two engine families. Let’s try and avoid this unfortunate habit. First off, two-stroke outboards are economically designed. When the engine stroke commences, they carry out the intake and compression stroke in one action. Likewise, the expansion and exhaust stroke take place as a second action. That compact cycling effect delivers power fast, but there are costs to be exacted when engine pistons multitask. For older two-stroke motors, expect noise and fuel inefficient operation. So far, then, things don’t look so good for two-stroke outboards, but we’re not finished with them just yet. 

Powerplant Efficiency: Four-Stroke Outboards

Refusing to multitask, the pistons in a four-stroke outboard motor separate the actions described in the previous paragraph of text. There’s a separate stroke for the intake action, for the compression stage, expansion, and the exhaust reaction. That’s all very good, so why are two-stroke outboards still around? Well, four-strokes are large. They also require more maintenance, probably because there are more moving parts under their beefy engine cowls. Still, even with the size issue causing problems for a boat’s transom, they’re more fuel efficient and up to 50% quieter than their smaller, noisier counterparts. 

Weighing the Performance Tradeoffs

Up to now, this post has been all about major differences, about performance gaps that seemingly make a clearcut buying choice easy. Unless a buyer’s boat is small and its hull is fragile, then a four-stroke outboard is the superior choice. Not so fast, though, technology has muddied the waters a little. Because of newer, more innovative designs, the latest two-stroke motors run quieter and they’re more fuel efficient, to boot. They’re also lighter and often more responsive than larger four-stroke motors, and they don’t require complex valving configurations or intricately designed camshafts. At the end of the day, just remember the key points mentioned above, then let the various manufacturers show off their wares. 

Using the above buyers-be-aware approach, boaters know that two-stroke outboards generally make more noise, but they’re usually responsive, so they take the time to seek out the latest generational models. Meanwhile, four-stroke outboard motors are quieter, they do discharge fewer emissions, and they’re extremely fuel efficient, but there’s still that chunky disposition to consider.