Okay i just started to think about this thread a couple minutes ago. Do you really trust mechanics even if they are working for the dealership. I mean a lot of times you take the car in and think your getting on thing fixed and boom something else goes wrong in a couple of days. I would really like to hear from some auto mechanics on this. is there just a higher chance of something else going wrong when you fix something else on the car? Just wondering cuase it has happened to me a few times.
The Latest one really kind of pissed me off but i guess i get what i paid for. I hit a car and didn't damage theres but damaged my fathers so i went and got the car fixed from a friends friend that really did the work cheap and did a good job. After i got the car back i noticed that my anti theft code for the radio was not working. I have used this code for 7 years and it always worked. I took a closer look at the Radio and noticed it is the same type of radio but not the exact one in my car. I had it removed only to find the Serial number didnt match. I told my father that they changed the radio from day one that we got it back but he said "no they wouldn't do that blah blah" well guess what they did. All this time has past by so i can't go up there and be like hey my radio was switched and i finally found out. Not only that it's a friend of a friend and i feel bad if i say anything. Other than that some of our other cars would go in for minor repairs and later on it would start having other problems. i can't say that they are directly related but i was just wondering.
Not a dealership...just another body shop that my parents friends knew. He owns a Junk Yard off shepard and told me about this guy cause he would fix it for cheap if i paid cash which i did, but that's when the switch happened.
Do your own work. Buy your own tools and equipment. At least buy the Helm's manual for your particular car. It will save you hundreds if not thousands if you keep your cars forever (as I do). I don't trust other people with my automobiles just like I don't just trust anybody with my children.
BEST ADVICE ON THIS SITE EVER, but Bama's is pretty good also Case in point, I went to get my inspection sticker, but I drove about a week with no gas cap after leaving it at a gas station. My check engine light came on. I went to Firestone to get the sticker and they said they couldn't do the inspection with the light on. Fair. But then they wanted to charge me $100 to get a "master mechanic" to turn it off after charging me for the inspection. So I went to my mechanic and he did it for free. All the "master mechanic" was going to do was hook the car up to a computer to tell me I needed a gas cap.
Well, its not suprising that a junk yard on Shepherd (BTW, for those of you who don't realize, 99% of the junkyards in Houston and 99% of the used car lots in Houston are on Shepherd) would do something like that, whether you know them or not. What those guys do, is specialize in rebuilding totalled vehicles and then selling them for less than wholesale at 20% in house financing. With places like that, you are going to get what you pay for. Low quality at a cheap price. And if you are lucky, they won't steal something out of your car.
My wife's cousin has a Sunbird built exactly the same way. Wish she'd have brought it to my garage for a looksy, it would have cost her nothing but gas and I would found the ghastly welds in that car. Yeech!
I only trust a couple of places. There is one place here in the Heights I'd trust with any car. They've been around for years and an uncle of mine who was a tractor trailer mechanic for a big company would always recommend them when he didn't have time to do something himself. He always said they were trustworthy and did good work.
Well, the best advice was wiws316 to have a friend who is a mechanic. The problem is that it's a lot to ask a friend to fix your car - even if you are paying. If you can take to them at their shop, that's the best. I've been fortunate enough to have a close friend who is a mechanic and he has been invaluable. To address what bamaslammer said about doing all the work yourself, I agree that there are many things that we can do ourself, but you need someone who is good at diagnosing the problem. My buddy has shown me that he is an excellent diagnostician and I've been able to do a lot of my work by myself. It's nice to have him as a parachute in case something goes wrong. I asked him if he had ever screwed a customer by saying that they needed to replace something that didn't reallly need to be replaced. His response was perfect for the type of person he is - " No, I've never done that because it would mean that I had to do more work and I'm too lazy." That was funny to me. He did say that there are places that do stuff like that. As far as the check engine light, in my opinion, it's a sham if you try to get it fixed. Auto shops pay a lot of money for their computer so they charge you a lot to hook it up to the computer to find that there's just some kind of sensor that 's going off and not causing any real problems. Often all they have to do is undo the battery and reset the computer to get the check engine light off.
Once I went to Brake Check to have my brake pads changed out. Well the mechanics then told me it would be $20 extra to take each wheel out. WTF! That is $20 per wheel. I negotiated for it to be $5 for each wheel, and I thought I was still getting ripped. Then the funniest( or saddest) was the guy who was removing the wheels told me to pay him cash at that right moment. Not even to wait for the work to be completed. I did begrudginly and still to this day will never step foot in another Brake Check.
the only time you can trust an auto mechanic w/ auto repairs, is if he/she is your friend outside of their job.
Never go to Just Brakes, especially the one on 1960@Perry. Anytime I've taken a vehicle to them they come up with the same, we're going to have to do XXX amount of extra work for a couple of hundred more. One guy was so stupid that he came up with the same excuse for a car and a van I took there within 2 months of each other...I knew both were fine, they just needed new pads. I guess they work on commission or something . 'F%$#' mechanics.
As long as we're calling out particular mechanics, I'll go ahead and bash Mikey's on Almeda. I had brake trouble -- which turned out to be leaking brake cylinders on the real wheels that cost about $250 to fix -- and Mikey's told me that I basically had to replace the whole brake system for about $1,000. This prognosis cost $80 and he told me when I declined service that my car wasn't safe to drive, in the hopes of forcing me to stay. I took the car and the prognosis to another mechanic who told me it was mostly BS, except the cylinder trouble. I later looked Mikey up on bbb.org and found that he's got an Unsatisfactory rating. Wish I had done that for starters.
Courtesy Nissan knocked a hole in my air conditioner compressor while the car was in their shop for three months waiting on parts. They offered to fix it for $770. I declined figuring they'd just find something else to break while they had it. They also let the battery run down when they had it, so I had to buy a new battery after getting it back (that particular example has happened to me the last three times I've gotten a car repaired).
