jhammons01

10-4! You can have the pads out two minutes after you get the wheel off. 7 minutes later you can be putting the wheel back on.

Most of the time the rotors don't "need" turning. Just a new set of pads before you get that metal to metal.

FrankV702

iTrader: (14)

sounds like those purrfect auto care places.. get this.. I recently drove across country with my old boss from las vegas to orlando florida.. well she wanted to take her car and put no miles on it along with some stuff (furniture and other personal belongings) so she rented a budget truck and trailer to tow her car down there. Well before we go I change all her fluids and give the car a tune up. We get to florida and she takes it to a purrfect auto care just to get checked out and make sure everything is working good before she shipped it to the virgin islands.. they check it out, give her a call back and tell her it needs a oil change a new fuel filter (which i replaced about 3000 driven miles before) and some new spark plug wires (which i replaced before we went on the trip and they had 0 miles on them). They give her a quote of like 110 for parts and 3 hours of labor at 90 an hour. Well I go down with her to the store to pick it up because she isnt going to pay that for stuff I just did. we get there. and hes like are you sure you dont want the tune up done? shes like no.. I just changed it before I left. he replies.. well its probably because you just did that long drive across the country. she pulls out the dipstick and tells him, " are you crazy.. I towed the car here, these parts dont have any miles on the." she wipes the dipstick with her finger and points it in her face. nice new oil.. haha.. he had the most stupid look on his face, it was priceless.. showed up by a 57 year old woman..

K.ronic

Uber satisfaction. I love calling people like that out. Dirty bastards.....this is what is wrong with the auto industry right now. There a so few actually honest shops out there that people get turned of to going to any shop and end up with an unsafe car as Karack mentioned before. It's a vicious circle that will never stop untill there are no more thieves and scammers. Which, as we all know, will be exactly never..........

Atkins Dan

This is Why we {the Atkins Family} got out of the auto repair.. We got tired of people showing up thinking we were going to rip them off like the last shop did... Mom & Dad ran the auto repair for 18 years and even I have some stories to tell...

here is one that dad liket to tell all the time..

one of our verry first Clients {back in 1982 or so} drove her Automatic RX3 wagon and handed dad the keys and says the engine is smoking and it needs to be replaced.. so Dad wrote her up a Quote for an engine rebuild as that is what the client said she need done, Dad then telles her that is will be about a week to pull the engine out and rebuild it and put it back in...

She left and in a few HRS Dad call her back and says it is all fixed and you can come and get it..

when she comes in to get the car keep in mind she is thinking that she just got a rebuilt engine in her car... she is ready to pay intell she sees the bill of like 30-35 bucks...

Dad then tells her to NEVER go to any shop and tell them what to do, make them find the problem and make THE SHOP responsable for missing the problem in the first place..

the problem with ihis car was since it is an automatic there is a vac pod that bolts to the transmission when this item goes bad the rubber diafram will leak ATF all over the place so because it is hook to a vac line the engine sucks the fluid out causing the engine to smoke...

when we closed the Auto repair side of things in late 98 to early 99 she was still there wanting to get her Mazda fix by the Atkins family and there are many more of the same kind of stories like that from us...



Dan

JHew84

iTrader: (9)

Any of these chain oil/brake/muffler shops are all rip-offs. Midas mufflers is widely known for charging people for work that was never done, there was actually a whole undercover news story done on it. If you don't want to do the work yourself find a local shop with a good reputation, establish a good business relationship with the owner and a mechanic, then and ONLY then will you probably have any luck with someone else working on your car. Otherwise be prepared to drag the jack into the front yard .

and before someone chimes in, there is obviously exceptions with the chain shops, especially if you know someone who works there. But the majority of them are bad news and should be avoided, I have quite a few friends/aquaintance that worked for places like that and they all say corporate ********* put massive pressure on the management to operate in a crooked fashion.

Tyblat

Only reason I didnt do it myself was because for the slight increase in price, I can just have them do it and not have to drag the hydraulic jack out. that and I'm crazy busy this weekend.

Everyones seen the jiffy lube video right? where they didn't do any work? that was crazy.

str8ryd

iTrader: (473)

I haven't seen that video? Care to post it up.......

Tyblat

I'm not sure if this is the one your talking about, but have a look.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7fJWpuWSh7c


It really sucks for people that aren't knowledgeable about cars these days. So many crooked shops that try to screw consumers over.

lov-2-rev

iTrader: (87)

I took my truck to a quick lube place ONCE. It was only because I was renting a house for a month while waiting for the closing on my house, and had no place to drain the oil. Keep in mind, my truck had a tad under 200k on the motor at the time. I tell the guy that I want 15/w40. Slightly thicker oil to take up the slack. He gets done and hands me the bill. I pay and walk out to my waiting vehicle. I get ready to pull away and take a second glance at the bill again. In tiny lettering at the bottom it says 10/w30. I walk back in and say WTF. He says that they didnt have regular 15/w40, only high milage which costs extra. I say, "Ya, and? You didn't think to tell me this before you started the work?" He gives me some BS about willing to change the oil for the additional cost. I tell him very nicly to get bent, and leave. I get back to the rental house and decide to check the oil. Wouldn't you know it, the little grease monkey over filled it by a quart. Now I am realy heated. I drive back to the quick lube and raise holy hell. I made it well known what a scamer he was in the middle of his packed lobby. Not only did I get him to give me a full refund, but I counted 8 customers that walked out the door and drove away. Pay back is a bitch!

I've also called out the service manager at a local dealership when I brought my wifes SUV in for warranty work. He tells me that the shocks are all shot. I laugh to myself and tell him that he is full of it, seing as I replaced them only 2 weeks earlier. He then says that they were installed improperly. I now laugh out loud and say,"Do you mean to tell me that I can't manage to change a set of shocks properly?" At the exact same moment my wife pulls into the parking lot, directly in front of the service window.............in my completly custom slammed pickup. I point out the window and say to the gentleman," And yet I can build that with my own two hands." His jaw drops when he sees my wife get out and walk towards the door. He mutters something about them being the wrong shocks or something and I simply take the keys and walk out the door.

Moral is, you always gotta watch your back and the backs of your family members. There is someone out to scam you at every corner.

RX_Shopper

Part of the downward spiral of personal responsibility IMHO.

It is partly because of stuff like this that over the years I bought special tools and taught myself how to do a lot of stuff, like weld exhaust pipes and make AC fittings & hoses.

I always thought it was interesting how when I used to take my company car in for maintenance work at Goodyear, there was always the "come out here and let me show you something" line by the advisor, usually followed by you need brakes/shocks/suspension work, etc. The Chevy dealer soaked us for $750 to replace a fuel pump on a car that didn't fix the problem.

I really don't like others working on my cars.

My horror story involved being taken for $3,000 (half of the job price) for bodywork that was never done. I sued the shop and got a judgment, but have not collected a dime.


LOL at the time travel thing, a subordinate had turned in a report speaking about something happening and he used a date three months in advance (he had cut & pasted another report). I told him he had better be sure to be there three months from now to prevent it from happening!

blmcquig

iTrader: (15)

hehehe, time travel is awesome...

anywho, heres my story. i worked at a nissan dealership for about 4 months. back before i knew a single thing about rotaries. i had done a two trans. replacements on me and my friends cars, so i had a little experience. anyway, i was changing the oil in an older nissan (sentra or something like that) and i noticed the half shaft boots were torn. so i told the service writer, and he told the customer. keep in mind i have changed these myself before, so i knew they only cost 5-20 bucks tops. the service writer brings the customers (a 25-30 year old couple) out, shows them whats wrong and tells them it needs replaced immediatley. i figured, sure, it needs replaced, itll take maybe 30 mins, and cost probably 100 bucks for both. wrong. he quotes them at 200 per side. holy crap. then he tells them if they dont fix it right away, the axle will fail (wich it would. eventually) and the cost 1100 per side.
this is one of the reasons i cant be a tech anymore. absolute bs.

txfatboy

I can't count the number of cars whose brakes I have had to fix AFTER they have been to "a brake specialty shop". The problems ranged from calipers not tightened down to contaminated brake fluid (ie power steering fluid in master cyl.) that requires a complete replacement of ALL rubber components including the abs unit. Can you say $$$$$? Of course there's no way to prove they did it, right?
A little advise from an ASE Master tech with 20 years of honest work exsperience, if you have to take your car to a shop to be repaired do a little research. Ask if their techs are ASE certified (not just one of them), are they AAA recognized/approved, is the shop a member of the ASA, etc., etc. NOBODY can buy the parts and pay an experianced tech to do a proper brake job front AND rear for $99.00 and expect to stay in business. Remember, most of the "chain" stores, no matter what they "specialize" in have a formula to make a profit and that formula usually requires employing people with little to no experiance so they can keep their cost down. Do you really want someone working on you brakes or anything else on your car for that matter that was stocking the shelves at the local grocery store the week before? Oh, yeh, they did take that 30 min. training course, right??!!

fluffysheap

I took my GSL-SE to a track day and I only had generic brake pads on it... so I figured they would only be good for a couple laps at a time and I would just pull off when they started to fade. Well what actually happened is the pads just totally disintegrated probably on the first or second lap and I was stopping with rivets Now it turns out that rivets stop pretty good and don't fade until your brake fluid starts to boil, so I got like eight laps, and I was pretty happy, until I pulled off and heard this funny grinding noise

Took it to Midas and they wanted $1000... said I needed new rotors, calipers and pads. Well obviously I wasn't going to pay $1000 since I paid only $1500 for the whole car. Replaced the rotors and pads (with Porterfield R4), nothing wrong with the calipers, did the whole thing for like $300 and got new wheel bearings in the deal too.