The wheel had 4 lug nuts, not 5; was an early 1960s car with drum brakes in front if that matters. The wheel was not rotated fast enough to shake the ball joint. I later loosened the lug nuts, tightened them evenly and all was well. An astute observer would realize that the wheel, associated with ball joints, was a rear driver and that there is no axle on the front of a rear driver but instead there is a spindle which if bent, would not make the wheel wobble.
Sometimes a scammer will squirt oil on shocks and tell the customer they are leaking.
About 35 years ago, a colleague took her car to a well known chain . muffler shop for a replacement muffler under the warranty. She saw the technician squirt oil on the shock absorbers. The service manager then took her out to the service area and showed her that her shocks were defective. She then said, âIf the shocks are defective, why did your technician go to the trouble to oil them?â The service manager had no more to say.
I love it when liers are caught
The point was not whether the car needed castor/camber adjustment nor whether the car has struts. I said âusuallyâ.
My heartburn comes from being handed a printed report from a computerized alignment machine that has been falsified to indicate that they have corrected the caster/camber when in fact, they just set the toe and did not touch the other adjustments.
I was aware of this common practice because I worked my way through college turning a wrench, and I saw co-workers doing it. It recently happened to me when I marked the adjusters to get them back in exactly the same spot when I replaced strut inserts on my daughterâs Volvo, and then took the car to alignment shop.
In the pre-cell phone days, I was driving on an interstate when my car began to slow down as the transmission lost its grip. A trooper stopped and pushed me off the highway to a gas station, who called a tow truck. I was towed to a local transmission shop (a national chain outlet). I later found out my transmission needed a new torque converter (for about $300), but I was sold a complete rebuild for $2000.
I have my snow tires put on at the Mavis where I purchased them because they claim to do it for less. The manager comes over and tells me ( after a VERY long wait) that the brakes need to be replaced and the brake drums need servicing. I answer âOh really?â I try my best dumb blonde look. âDo you mind if i check my glove compartment?â, I ask. After a disgusted look from him, i pull out the last receipt from just 3,000 miles before in which all those items were replaced, repaired, etc. at the manufacturer recommended time ( which i follow to the letter, nerd that I am). " I guess your boys werenât doing their jobs that day, so I suppose there will be no charge then today!" After great guffaws, he excused himself âto check againâ. His attempt to get back at me worked because the tires were off the car for an additional hour because the mechanic âhad to take his lunch hour!â
This is why I repair my car myself whenever I can.
In Massachusetts, where the cars must be perfect, I have been burned twice to get an inspection sticker. In neither case was anything repaired. I just paid over $800 dollars each time to replace a $29 sticker on the basis of minor defects. One was a flex pipe in a 93 Eagle talon, and a new caliper to fix a weak e-brake, another time was rear brakes that I took apart later and found that nothing had been done at all. Neither was the first ârepairâ ever performed.
There is no protection against this kind of fraud in MA. The inspection shops have free reign to declare your vehicle deficient unless you hand over a lot of cash to bribe them for a sticker. No repairs are ever performed.
Years ago, I took my Chevy to a Jiffy Lube for an oil change. The employee told me my pvc valve needed replacement and had to be changed. I didnât ask for him to check it and wasnât about to about to pay %50 (in todayâs money) for it. Two ther customers coincidentally experienced the same problem as I did.
The car sputtered out of their lot directly to the Chevy dealer, where I bought a new valve to replace the one they broke for $14.
Last year, we were out of town and my wife got a flat. The tire was ruined with a slice in the sidewall. I found a local tire dealer and had the tire replaced for the agreed upon price of $108 +tax. When I got the itemized bill bill there was $20 Tire Warrantee. I didnât order this, I say. The boss insists that we charge this for every tire. My friend who recommended the place says he never got charged for that scam.
My '94 Chrysler did the same thing. The 3.5L of that year is a non-interference engine. The belt jumped while I was on the turnpike doing about 80. You would have thought a UFO was beaming signals at my car. The tach flipped out, the cruise light went off and on several times, along with the ABS warning, the âTrac Offâ, and most of the other warning lights, then I coasted to a halt. Apparently a timing belt problem at high speed confuses the heck out of the engine management system on these cars!
A three year old Ford Escortâs back wheels were visibly canted in at the top. Four different shops said a ârear wheel alignmentâ. Since the price differed wildly from shop to shop, I continued to get quotes. Finally, Darren at Charing Cross Car Care Center took the manual off of the shelf and showed me the page for Escort: rear end service. It stated ârear wheel alignment - Not possibleâ. It needed shocks. Naturally he got the job.
âTo keep everything balanced how about an upcoming feature on the countless ways that customers try to scam repair shopsâ
My brother is co-owner of a plumbing company. He says that his most difficult customers are often in the upscale neighborhoods. These people are the ones that quibble over a bill and are late in paying the bill. In working class neighborhoods, he has never had a customer argue about his charges.
I worked at a service station (quit after 2 weeks) in the early 70âs that went to junk yards, buy used parts like starters, compressors, alternators, then spray paint them and sell them as new parts.
I will say that I recently went to a âMyteeâ chain and asked them to check the alignment and steering components, as it hadnât been done in a long time and my car was pulling a little to the right. They checked it, printed out an analysis, and said everything was fine. They worked on it for about a half hour and charged me $20 for the bother of setting up their alignment rack, which I cheerfully paid. But these guys have always been honest, at least with me, and Iâve been going there for years.
Then the fun of going back to the Firestone place with proof that I had a bad tire and that they were lying to me about the alignment being bad.
I had an older Volvo that was âchecked outâ by a foreign auto repair place and given a clean bill of health. I should have known there would be trouble when the whole exhaust fell off the next day, which he did fix. The owner of the place told me to âignoreâ the check engine lightâput electrical tape over it if it bothered me because Volvos usually have the engine light on (!). Also the oil pressure light was on, and this wasnât a problem either- just ignore. SO, after a simple fix of the problem with the check engine light, the oil pressure problem was fixed with a couple of o-rings. The oil pressure problem would have eventually caused the engine to seize. The fuel gauge was next and was fixed with an inexpensive sensor from ebay⊠The owner of the shop recommended that it not be fixed because it was too much trouble; âJust keep track of the milesâ, he said. I thoroughly question his knowledge of Volvos after finding out that there is a way to get at and fix the fuel sensor easily. The spider gears were replaced with a locker (it drove great in the snow). I added many parts from salvage yards, including a nice radio. I was very happy with my Volvo wagon. BUT the car failed 8 months later because the dopey owner of the foreign auto shop replaced the head gasket without checking the head for hairline cracks. He probably just eyeballed it without magnafluxing it. The car overheated and died. The shop owner wouldnât stand by his work-- and the car was junked. Sad but true story, really sad.
nasty!
Iâve heard of many scams over the years, but the most outrageous one was the time I took my car to an AAMCO transmission shop because of difficulty getting the car into gear. They said I needed a complete rebuild of the transmission. I took the car to an independent shop recommended to me by a mechanic friend, and they had me up and running for $68. They said even if I had needed a rebuilt transmission, they could have installed one for less than 1/4 the price I had been quoted.
A few years ago the alternator went bad on my Subaru. I went to PEP Boys for a rebuilt alternator, installed it, and it fried the new battery I had just had installed. To their credit, they did replace the alternator, the battery and something else that was ruined, but it took all day. They obviously were selling bad parts, although perhaps unwittingly.
When I began having starting problems after I personally replaced the alternator in my 83 Dodge van I did not suspect a faulty replacement unit and tried many things to solve the problem.
When the van finally refused to start I had it towed to the nearest garage where the mechanic told me the alternator was bad. He gave me a labor estimate of an hour to replace it which I knew was far too long. To my surprise he rolled under the car instead of removing the cowling, which gave total access to the unit.
He actually spent an hour under the car. Several times I checked to make certain he had not died.
When he finished and I could not start the van, he had the cowling off and fixed the problem in a matter of minutes; he was on his own time at that point. Fortunately, when I passed his shop a year later he was out of business.
I had just moved away to College in 1997 and my '81 Ford F150 had the engine completely rebuilt that winter. About a month after it was finished I went on a 6 hour road trip and at the exact mid-point (ironic?) the clutch pedal stops working. I canât change gears at all. I get towed by a farmer into a small town of <500 people. The only mechanic in town checks my car and tells me the clutch is bad. I donât think this is right because I just spent 2 months waiting for my entire engine to be replaced and I was pretty sure we also replaced other things, like the clutch, while it was âeasy to get toâ. Being 18 and not real sure what I was talking about, I defer to the âprofessionalâ and sit in the waiting room for 4 hours. When it was done, I asked to see the clutch and they showed me some rusted out, terrible looking clutch. When I finally got back home and talked to my mechanic, he showed me that what had actually broke was a bar that connected the clutch pedal to the clutch (which was still in the truck and had not been replaced). The mechanic would have had to physically touch that bar to do his repair and would have seen the damage. He had also swapped out my brand new clutch for an older, albeit workable, clutch. So basically I paid several hundred dollars to give away my new clutch and not get the real repair work needed (which would have been less than $100). I always wonder if I was even shown a clutch that would have even fit my truck. I definitely know that mechanic had a good laugh and made an incredible profit that day at my expense.