Importance of a trustworthy mechanic
 

I mentioned in another thread that I'd had the cylinder head on my 1.8 turbo replaced with what I was told was a reconditioned head and that some 12 months later I was noticing water loss. That head was replaced the other day by another mechanic who tells me that never on earth had the head been reconditioned and that it had been replaced with the cheapest gasket. The faulty head -pitted and over skimmed - was replaced and now the car is fine. The moral of the story I think is to find a trustworthy mechanic and stay with him!

I agree 100%, a friend with a classic car asked me to look at his brakes. He had asked his local garage to bleed the brakes as he did not feel confident that it was stopping as it should and the pads and discs were not that old. The garage charged him £50.

I reckon they did not bother, what do you think
https://i.postimg.cc/jSqY3k7w/Brake-fluid.jpg
This is brake fluid that is less than a month old according to the invoice. I think they just charged him £50.

Did he ask them to bleed the brakes or CHANGE the fluid ??

If just bled you can still get fluid that colour out of the system.---;)




Based on my experience of bleeding brakes from 1954 onwards.---Lol.

The fluid in the reservoir was the same colour, even if they only depressed the pedal a few strokes on each caliper it would have been better than this.
Personally if I worked in a garage and had this come out I would have replaced the fluid if I was bleeding the brakes, maybe it is me ?

my local mechanic is a trustworthy guy . and he's not very expensive rgds mark

Far too many cowboys about :mad: I had to work on a customers car today that had been previously been worked on by some idiot cowboy, who thinks he’s a hack mechanic, because he decided to fit rear springs with isolators blocking the waterways on the rear arms and then thought it was clever to charge the customer 3 hrs labour, it’s not acceptable.....

Mick

Don't get me started, I had a good one today. A classic car owner had an exhaust manifold leak and he gave the car to his local garage with the gaskets a couple of weeks ago. They rung him to say it was taking longer than they thought as a couple of the nuts were seized solid. He got it back the following day with a £480 bill. 2 miles from the garage it started leaking again so turned round and they said the manifold must be distorted.

Today I got started on it and though it odd that there was a lot of exhaust cement around the manifold joint, I undid all the nuts ( some were very seized so needed some heat) and I removed the manifold. No sign of a new gasket and I reckon all they had done was put some paste around the joint and let it dry ( hence needing more time).

Total job time 3 hours including cleaning the manifold joints and cleaning all the threads.

The owner is going back to the original garage with the photos so it will be interesting to see what they say especially given the excuse for needing more time.

Reading stories of this sort make me glad I'm capable of doing all my own mechanical jobs, and thankfully we have trustworthy people like Big Russ and MarinaBrian to call on for any tasks like ECU and other elec things I have little to no understanding of. Don't know how cowboys like that sleep at night.

i have had noting but trouble with mechanics the larg garages ar worst i find

you can be talking to the head mec, then when u leave a first year mec looks at your car inbtween looking at his/her phone .. no dis respect ment to the young lad or lass .
smaller garages are more trustworthy i find .
search up your issue on the net first at least you can gauge by his responce to certan qustions

if he is a chancer or not :devil:


thats what i do anyway



rob