I’m willing to laugh at you, Wes. Won’t be long before we get everyone else to.
When I worked in a Chrysler-Plymouth dealership, I always felt we had a better understanding of the problems and repairs affecting Chrysler-Plymouth vehicles than most garages.
The three reasons for that were:
- Our direct line to corporate keeping us updated on problems they were seeing nationwide.
- Our monthly training.
- We tended to only work on Chrysler-Plymouth vehicles - breeding familiarity.
Unfortunately, we were always pressured by the service manager and dealership owner to up-sell repairs and questionable maintenance.
I mention the above because I do believe dealers possess the greatest technical talent for the more difficult problems affecting a vehicle. However, as others have noted, they do have a high cost structure - leading to higher repair costs.
I’m an advocate of finding a good independent repair shop. But as usual, buyer beware because unethical independents exist as well.
I had a great experience with the service department at a Pontiac dealer in a little Illinois town back in 1963. I had a 1955 Pontiac–had upgraded from a 1947 Pontiac–and was on my way from Southern Illinois where I attended graduate school back to east central Indiana. I had left about 6:00 p.m. after I had finished turning in grades for the courses I taught as a graduate assistant and was making the 350 mile trip home. The car started acting up and I was afraid I would be stranded by the side of the road. I pulled into a motel that advertised a vacancy. The proprietor told me that he only had one room left and I might not want it. He said that the television wasn’t working in the room, but if I would take the room, he would only charge me $4. I grabbed the room. The bed was very comfortable and the towels were the thickest I have ever seen. The next morning, I had to make a decision about where to take the car and knowing nothing about the town, I decided to take a chance on the Pontiac dealer. I explained my situation to the service manager and he put a mechanic right on the car. After an hour, they said I was ready to go. When I went up to the cashier to pay my bill, it was only $5. I said that there had to be a mistake–the mechanic had spent quite a bit of time on my car and the bill should be higher. The service manager came over and explained that the mechanic had done an emergency repair to get me home, but told me that I needed to have the valve lifters replaced. He said they could only charge $5 because he didn’t like a car leaving his shop that wasn’t exactly right. There are some really great people in the world.
I don’t usually use a torque wrench to remove the lugs I just wanted to see how tight they were. When I tighten them with my torque wrench they are very easy to remove, these I could not break free with my large spinner wrench or my 18" breaker bar. I had to put a pipe over it and they still took a lot of muscle. I have shrunk 2" and 50 lb in my old age but I am still 6’ !" and 220 lb.
As far as taking a lot more torque to remove, I have found it doesn’t take a lot more on clean threads if you remove them the same day, certainly not more than 100 ft lb.
I would guess some of these took 250 -300.