Don't you love customers!

[Bigjoe]

Thats a good garage Steve, ive lent my car to people if theirs is off the road when im repairing it, my local garage's attitude 'Not my problem'.

I like the older porsche's but the newer ones dont interest me,very few of the high performance/supercars do i prefer the classics more.

My old boss bought a 993, it was like the red arrows going down the road...he answer was it's meant to do that,it's oil cooled! think he went through 5 lts of mobil one every 2 weeks.

 

[tigler]

They are in fact partially oil cooled but generally on the engine exterior !!!
Oil consumption is one of their problems.

 

[runnach]

Also , how often is a Porsche seen on the road actually being given any stick !

I often babysit me lads Porsche when he is out the country and, I often hear from him via telephone............

Hows things dad?............fine...........hows the weather........****e...........hows work................dbl ****e............hows the car...........fine, but I reckon you will be banned by the time you return

Why, coz it gets the welly by moi

I actually prefered the BMW X5.

 

[SC_BK]

Well Big Joe, it seems our survey says you charge too much

Atleast your customer came out with the truth, some people ask me for a price and say "ok I'll phone you back in 2min with the details" and you never hear from them again!

 

[Bigjoe]

Well i priced job accordingly as the guy was a pain in the **** from the start,had he said yes i would have done it but i only priced it as a favour for my friend.

I normally charge £25-30 an hour depending on the job (and person in question).

 

[the snooper]

Well Big Joe, it seems our survey says you charge too much

its like family fortunes here

we asked a hundred people if big joe charged to much and our survey said

 

[Bigjoe]

If it's there ill give you the money myself!

 

[Rick]

Price it at what you feel just.

Its hard when its friends of friends because your "friends" big you up to be good thinking there doing you a favour, so they then expect the world for a fiver.

I don't mind doing jobs for friends. But sometimes its a real pain in the ****. I charge £40-£100 per hour normal rate. If I do a job that takes 2-3 hours for a mate and charge £50-60 they see it as me getting £20 per hour. Not that i've just lost loads of money.

 

[Wedg1e]

Don't you love the designers that never have to change anything.

One of the women at work bought a Suzuki WagonR a few years ago; we duly popped the bonnet and took a look... I seem to recall we decided you'd need to take the engine out to change the alternator. Of course it may have been possible just by removing the exhaust system and half the suspension, thank god I never had to find out

My mother has a Stilo so thanks for the tip on the headlamp bulb... my dad's car is a Megane and if you take the front bumper off (think you need to in order to adjust the headlamp basic setting) then you have to line Renault's pockets for new clips with which to refit it. At least the old fella won't have to worry about it, he died 6 months ago. Just wish mam would decide which car she wants to bloody well keep!

 

[Bigjoe]

[I seem to recall we decided you'd need to take the engine out to change the alternator.

Ive often felt a likeness to a vet at times,removing components or performing some sort of operation entirely by feel

 

[Wedg1e]

The warranty claims are apparently orbital but Porsche never argue with customers and sometimes never even tell them there has been a repair...!

Now that reminds me of an issue that L***s had with one of their cars (late last century!).

I used to look after the x-ray systems for an alloy wheel plant in Cardiff. It was owned by a major casting company but being one of their smaller factories it was used for small-volume production and development work - Rolls-Royce wheels were cast there, as well as these new L***s wheels.

One day we arrived on site and as we had to keep passing the metallurgy department we kept peeping in at what was going on, our curiosity fired by all these wheels that had cloths thrown over them.

Eventually we twisted someone's arm and the story was that a number of these cars had gone into the scenery. Some owners reported odd handling problems immediately prior to the crashes but apparently it took one guy, a driver of some repute, to stack his car before L***s sat up and took notice.

The foundry was in the middle of destructively-testing some wheels. When the wheels were CADCAMed, they ran finite element analysis and so on and the figures predicted that the wheels were man enough, however what had happened in the crashes was that the hub centres had fractured out of the wheels. Essentially the real-world conditions were inducing stresses that the computer modelling hadn't foreseen.
From memory, the torque on the hub trying to spin the wheel one way, versus the friction and drag of the wheel and tyre lagging behind it, plus the sideways loading when cornering, was causing the slender spokes to twist forward and backward until the alloy work-hardened and fractured at the root. The foundry was able to replicate the failure and the wheel was redesigned.

As this was a new car, sales would have gone through the floor if such a safety issue was made public so L***s quietly arranged for the cars already sold to have new wheels fitted, allegedly either without telling the owners or else it was passed off on some flimsy pretext such as lacquer cracking.
The car in question became the basis of several other successful models and the foundry (at Whitchurch) is now a housing estate, so I understand. The x-ray machines went to another company not far from J2 of the M5...