I have know the "ball" on a track rod end to break off. Such mipending failure wouldn't be picked up by an MOT.
Thankfully the steering gear is put under most stress when parking or low speed manoeurvres so least likely to break at speed.
I can only act on the experience that I, my friends and family have had, whenever someone thinks they have discovered a good garage it's only been a matter of time before they find out otherwise.
Some of the experiences I've personally had: Half the bolts left off the bell housing on a Transit after a clutch change. A front end rebuild following a shunt that was assembled with no sealer or adhesive on the wings so they were only attached by two screws. An exhausts that was for the wrong car, but they managed to jam it on anyway. An MOT station claimed 10 failure points when there were only 2 according to another, the remaining 8 have not appeared in two subsequent MOTs! A dealer phoned up and claimed that I had to have certain work done to pass the MOT, so I paid up, I later found that it had passed first time and these items were only advisories. And the latest and worse incident, that could indeed have cost us our lives if it had happened on a motorway.
And that doesn't include all the dirty sales tricks they've tried to pull on me over the years, one even succeeded, I bought a new Renault from a dealer only to discover that their dealership had been "terminated" by Renault a few weeks before. That didn't stop them displaying the logos at the time, and delivering a car that they had bought from another dealer 100 miles away so was in fact second hand, but they had actually bought it cash and driven it down unregistered so that this little fact didn't appear on the registration!. I didn't find out until I had a breakdown and tried to get it fixed under warranty, eventually discovering that there had been a factory recall about the issue but of course It didn't get to me 8-(.
So unless there's something uniquely bad about the garages around here, yeah right, I wouldn't expect a lot of sympathy!.
Greg
Yes I have a brother too but your remark is sort of self incriminating. OK so your brother does a good job but if it's a policy of the boss to skimp then it hardly makes that a good garage!
..but in my experience it's the service industry in general - garages, restaurants, accountants, lawyers, builders, etc etc. This country seems to be built on making false promises and delivering sub-standard service at high prices.
Go and eat in a restaurant in Australia few times and you'll be begging for English cooking.
One MOT tester broke my handbrake cable. Yes, OK, it must have needed replacing anyway, but I think he was a bit embarrassed about it - he let me have the certificate as it had worked when he actually tested the brakes!
I doubt that. I know the garage quite well. It's our local main Ford dealer. I get all my MOT's done there, and drive past it every day. Mike.
Note that I said garages. I am well aware that there are many good individual auto mechanics, but with most garages, you take pot luck as to whether one of those will be working on your car. Mike.
I have. Everywhere we ate was fantastic. The portions were huge and the food was beautifully cooked. The cooking style was a meld of all of the nations adapted to the local environment. The one poor experiance we had was a take out steak place that seemed to depend on slot machines for income rather than food. Even tiny liitle out of the way diners had lovely food. That was in Adelaide, Barossa, wossname desert, Perth and the area below Perth such as Albany. We were damned close to applying for immigration visas we loved it so much.
Warwick
MotorsForum website is not affiliated with any of the manufacturers or service providers discussed here. All logos and trade names are the property of their respective owners.