Feeling the garage is about to try and rip me off.

yak.h'cir

yak.h'cir

yak.h'cir

Soldato
Joined
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How long do you think it should reasonably take for a mechanic to find a faulty injection valve when a car presents with extra high fuel consumption, juddering and miss firing? Given that they've already found there's a problem with the fuel mix in the engine.

I picked up my car a couple of weeks ago after they'd had it on and off for about a month (they'd bodged a previous repair (replace leads, coil pack) but owned up to it and were trying to fix and get the car running properly). When they replaced their previous work and the engine problems were still there they said the new problem was unrelated and would I like them to track it down, that it would take 2-3 hours. Anyway, they replaced the seals around the manifold and found a faulty injector and gave the car back to me to test for a couple of weeks to make sure it was working properly, which it seems to be.

The problem comes as they've indicated that they've spent so many hours on the car that if they bill me for them all I'd be as well of just binning the car (ford Ka), but that they'll work something out and get back to me.... I'll find out later what they're expecting me to pay so before that happens I was curious what people thought would be a reasonable price for this repair?
 
EEK... not a great position to be in. The garage should really have kept you up to date with the cost of repairs at regular intervals to stop the costs spiralling out of control.

I think it is just a case of waiting until they say what the damage will be.
 
ive never understood how garages can charge you for their incompetence and lack of fault finding skills...

half of them seem to just take a stab in the dark and expect you to pay when it doesnt fix the problem///
 
arknor said:
ive never understood how garages can charge you for their incompetence and lack of fault finding skills...

half of them seem to just take a stab in the dark and expect you to pay when it doesnt fix the problem///
Click to expand...

exactly, i wouldnt get paid if i took someone to gatwick instead of heathrow.
 
in any other line of work you dont expect to pay for work that didnt need doing mechanics should be no different.

most are monkeys with poor training who dont have a clue and should not be let anywhere near a car
 
Sometimes fault finding isnt quick or easy.

My worst so far was a renault laguna with a engine light coming on and going into limp home, the fault kept coming back as lambda sensor.

easy enough? no.

It was a diesel and wasn't fitted with one. The fault in the end was several slightly bent valves just causing a slight blow back under certain load conditions, the blow back was tricking the MAP and MAF sensors (not enough out of parameters for their own codes) to give false readings, the ECU didnt know what was going on and kept throwing out a 'I haven't got a clue' code.


The customer complained that it took a couple of days to track down and walked away with a sarky 'the ecu tells you what needs doing' comment.
 
A lot of the time I'm sure they actually do it on purpose, I used to own a fiesta with a puma engine, and the lambda sensor was a common failure, quite often in the puma forums you wou get some exasperated individual who had the dizzy, ht leads and god knows what else replaced by a dealers, quite often a good few hundred quid, and they still had an issue, it was always the lambda at fault, it was that common that there's no way a 'ford' mechanic wound not know about it.
 
you're whinging at them replacing the ht leads, coilpacks e.t.c for a suspected misfire? its a pretty logical thing to do that first! fault finding isnt easy. what if they replaced your injectors first and the problem was a faulty ht lead? either way your ****ed, soo.. :/
 
arknor said:
ive never understood how garages can charge you for their incompetence and lack of fault finding skills...

half of them seem to just take a stab in the dark and expect you to pay when it doesnt fix the problem///
Click to expand...

And exactly what else are they supposed to do? Rub their Snap On™ diagnostic crystal ball and go from there? Cars are still immensely complicated machines with loads and loads of stuff to go wrong. What people outside workshops seem to forget is that even now days fault finding isn't a matter of bunging a computer onto the car and it telling us exactly where the problem is, what part is needed and how many cups of tea it is going to take to get the job done.

In some (actually most) cases fault finding comes down to the process of elimination and luck. It sucks but that's a matter of life. They are not going to want to happily swallow the cost of buying and fitting nice shiny new parts to your car, regardless of if it fixes your problem or not, and why the hell should they? What you've got to do as a customer is stand firm and moan enough that they eventually back down or go some ways to sorting you out.

I'm sure a few people will ignore this and have a moan about the motor trade and claim that this sort of stuff isn't accepted in any other trade, and that we're all thevinig robbing *****, Seemingly forgetting that dodgy builders, electricians, plumbers, hell, even doctors will sometimes go down the 'I'm not really sure what the problem is so I'm going to take a reasonable guess' route.
 
Took me 4 or so hrs to diagnose two simple (lol) faults the other day on a non runner that got trailered in.
Customer explains "Just pulling onto my drive and it stopped".
So it fires up and then stops, more cranking and it would just continue to crank. Leave it for a short while and it would fire up and then stop..
Classic fuel pump issue I thought to start with. (common fault with them)
Checked that.. nope pump was fine.
Maybe a the pressure regulator had failed... Nope wasn't that.
Scoped the Coil packs... they were firing
Plugs... they were fine.
WTF
Got to be MAF sensor then.....
Normally this car will go into a fail safe mode if you un plug it and it normally fires up after that. so I discounted it right there when that didn't work.
It wasn't until I was in the middle of scoping some of the other sensors thinking, well they are all there in the right order and it was timing up correctly...
Then I thought (only through experience) the injector duration was somewhat short)
The only thing controlling injector duty during crank is MAF (water temp and MAP also has a small input but OBD data was telling me it matched air temp/pressure fine.)
So it had to be the MAF
There was a gamble right there. Order and fit new MAF.
Well it fired up :D
But instead of now being too lean to start it was now too rich... way too rich.
WT double F.

Long story short, as I want to go to bed now:D...
It had been mapped on a failing MAF sensor so the figures in the ECU were a mile away from where they needed to be.
Temporarily adjusted the output voltage to the ECU from the MAF so the customer could drive it safely to his mapper and get it re done.
Fly in the ointment for him was he was selling it in two days.

Easy in hindsight..
 
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How about todays customer. (yes I'm still not in bed)

Wheel wobble through steering wheel.
Been to three different garages and had his wheel balancing done FOUR times.
Each time he was told it was out, they re did it and the problem persisted.
I check the runout, whether the wheels were buckled or flat spotted, tyres were new ish and not worn funny.
Wheels fitted to spigots correctly, nuts tight etc..
Ok lets check the balance myself.
Sure enough all four were out on our machine.
So I do all four wheels dynamically in plain hope...
Customer now getting late for work.. :rolleyes:
I was thinking next maybe to de rim a couple to see if they had tyre goo in them as that plays havoc with balancing. but the customer had to leave.
He paid for the balancing reluctantly and said he'll be back after work.

Phone call half an hour later..
Car was perfect!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

How the **** can 3 different garages not be able to do a ****ing wheel balance correctly!
 
how does the charging work at powerstation work Scuba

Do they just take the number of hours you spent and multiply it by the hourly rate they charge ?
 
In a normal situation yes.

It's a bit like one of the above posters said though..
If the time taken starts taking the mick, then they make up a figure that's lower than the overall time spent to one that's less likely to give the customer a heart attack. :D

eg,
Head gasket change on one car is 25 hrs work but we charge 20hrs I think
 
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Scubascorpion said:
In a normal situation yes.

It's a bit like one of the above posters said though..
If the time taken starts taking the mick, then they make up a figure that's lower than the overall time spent to one that's less likely to give the customer a heart attack. :D

eg,
Head gasket change on one car is 25 hrs work but we charge 20hrs I think
Click to expand...

I'm pretty sure 20 hours labour is still a heart attack! Whats the rate there?
 
Somewhere around £50-60 per hr.

That 20 hr job isn't an out of the blue figure it's a set charge for that job.
About a grand is what the customer is expecting for that.
 
Scubascorpion said:
Took me 4 or so hrs to diagnose two simple (lol) faults the other day on a non runner that got trailered in.
Customer explains "Just pulling onto my drive and it stopped".
So it fires up and then stops, more cranking and it would just continue to crank. Leave it for a short while and it would fire up and then stop..
Classic fuel pump issue I thought to start with. (common fault with them)
Checked that.. nope pump was fine.
Maybe a the pressure regulator had failed... Nope wasn't that.
Scoped the Coil packs... they were firing
Plugs... they were fine.
WTF
Got to be MAF sensor then.....
Normally this car will go into a fail safe mode if you un plug it and it normally fires up after that. so I discounted it right there when that didn't work.
It wasn't until I was in the middle of scoping some of the other sensors thinking, well they are all there in the right order and it was timing up correctly...
Then I thought (only through experience) the injector duration was somewhat short)
The only thing controlling injector duty during crank is MAF (water temp and MAP also has a small input but OBD data was telling me it matched air temp/pressure fine.)
So it had to be the MAF
There was a gamble right there. Order and fit new MAF.
Well it fired up :D
But instead of now being too lean to start it was now too rich... way too rich.
WT double F.

Long story short, as I want to go to bed now:D...
It had been mapped on a failing MAF sensor so the figures in the ECU were a mile away from where they needed to be.
Temporarily adjusted the output voltage to the ECU from the MAF so the customer could drive it safely to his mapper and get it re done.
Fly in the ointment for him was he was selling it in two days.

Easy in hindsight..
Click to expand...

Had something similar a few years ago, can't remember what the car was but it taught me that just plugging it in doesn't always work.
Car comes in with evil misfire, way down on power, quite smokey.
Had a dozen codes stored, misfires on all the plugs, bad lead on all the plugs, coil error, lambda error, etc, etc.

After a day of pulling stuff off and finding it fine, it turned out to be a sensor on the flywheel, flywheel teeth must have picked up a lump of muck (god knows how what with being inside the bellhousing!) and mashed the end off the sensor, about 1/4" missing from the end of the plastic fitting, but no error code.
 
That's one of the reasons scoping everything first helps put you in the right direction.
Scope would have shown odd number of teeth missing on it's cycle.
I know, I know. Easy to say in hindsight. :D

All good fun :)
 
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