squeek squeek!

It drives me crazy!

But not for the reasons that you would think,
A 2010 Subaru is in our driveway and the complaint is a faint squeak noise when applying the clutch.

We asked the client to drive the vehicle with us and show us which specific noise he was talking about.
As he hadn't allowed himself enough time to do that, he was already late for work and asked that we should take him to work. Easy enough, consider it done, we said.

Can you ask the client for more information, the mechanic said. We texted and left a message for him to reply but he must have been very busy.

Do you have any idea what it takes to find the source of a little and infrequent noise?. Specially one the client didn't have time to show you.
Pure hell! is what it takes at times, easy at others and no way of knowing which one of the two it will be until you are deep into the job.
A good portion of the time, it takes two people as one drives and the other listens. That's two employees you have use to try and get the job done.

Mind you, if there are ten doctors in the operating room, all ten get paid. If an attourney consults another about your case, they both get paid as well. But you can toss two or three mechanics into one job and only one, if! and that's a big if, get's paid.
I have no idea why in our trade, multiple mechanics working on the same problem don't get the pay and the respect other professions get. 
You may opine that is due to a lack of trust. But attorneys do no enjoy any more or less trust than auto mechanics. And when you have to write "this is the good leg"  before surgery, I can't imagine you trust doctors anymore than mechanics or attourneys?
In the case I'm writing about, we never realy heard the noise. But given the parameters and circumstances that caused the complaint, it came from the clutch, transmission, slave cylinder or master cylinder area. As we took the time to rule out the sources, the only one we could not, was the slave cylinder. We offered that as a suggestion and the owner agreed to do it. 
The owner drove the vehicle away and came back within a short period of time to say the noise was still there, and furthermore, the pedal would go further down that before. 

We re-bled the system and after a road test, we released the vehicle. No noise and no dropping pedal.

Two days later, the owner took it to another shop as he says the pedal had once again dropped to the floor. 
Again, I had personally driven this vehicle for one full hour in heavy rush hour traffic. Throughout all this time, the clutch felt great to me.I would imagine the pedal must have dropped again for the client to go elsewhere.
The one thing that bothers me, is the fact the other shop told the owner the slave cylinder we had replaced couldn't have been the source of the noise. They never spent one second trying to find it, and yet, they concluded that whatever it was, it was not the slave cylinder. They were only asked second hand about the noise but were quick to opine about how wrong we had been in our diagnosis. I would guess some shops would use it as a means of connecting with the new client, by maligning the previous shop.
It saddens me when other shops will put you down in hopes of acquiring your business.
What saddens me the most, is how easy, people are willing to trust someone whom they just met, and only because they maligned the previous repair shop.
#subaru,#clutch,#pedal

Keep ruining it for everybody else

It's a quiet morning at work in the city of Ventura and I'm staring out through the front window, the weather as usual, is magnificent. But all that is about to change.

A vehicle was towed here recently, it had quit on the road, it was a Toyota Yaris with high miles and had not received any loving care and attention for some time. How do we know this you may ask?

On May the 11th of this year, we decided to give back to the community. Through the local churches in town, we selected 12 single moms who we knew could not afford to have professional car care performed on their vehicles. We decided to give these moms a free oil change, rotate the tires, inspect brakes, suspension, shocks, struts, belts and hoses, replace the wiper blades and send the vehicle to the car wash. All this as a courtesy, free of charge. Our budget was about $500.00 per car aided in by a grant from AC Delco.  First come first serviced as per our web site.  No strings attached.
We know it is tough to be a single mom. Never having enough money to make ends meet and never having enough time for their children and for themselves.
One of those cars was this Toyota Yaris.  The oil change and inspection work was done but due to her late appointment, we weren't able to perform any of the suggested work.  We gave her the information on her vehicle and she went on her way. Unfortunately the vehicle needed a substantial amount of maintenance and repairs which is not uncommon for these single mom vehicles.   She never mentioned "thanks" for the information and left.  But hey!, we weren't doing it for the appreciation, we just wanted to give back.

Fast forward to today and the vehicle just got towed here. We called her back to let her know the vehicle had arrived and we needed to do some inspection work. She approved the inspection work and we got started.

After the inspection, the quote was put together and we contacted her. The initial quote was for a large sum of money (which included all the previous information plus the current repairs). She needed brake pads and rotors, front and rear, struts, front and rear, radiator and cooling system hoses, the fuel pump and filter, belts, the spark plugs had over 150 K miles and the catalytic converter had a code P0420 stored in computer memory,  and of course, she could not afford it. We called her back with a different quote which did not include any maintenance.  It was quite a bit less but still she could not afford it. We called her a third time with a quote for just the bare minimum to get the car rolling (the fuel pump) . She said she would call us back. We went as far as letting her know that we would honor some of the mothers' day repairs by donating back $400 since she had been unable to let the vehicle stay back then for us to do some of the Free work.

The call back never materialized, but a tow truck did so on our driveway. "I'm here to pick up the Toyota" the driver said. We replied that it was not put together as we were waiting for a call back from the client,  additionally, there was an authorized inspection fee that had to be settled.

The tow truck left and soon the owner appeared ready to do combat. She wanted to know why we did not release the vehicle. That was an easy one! We weren't authorized to release it as she never called us back as promised.

"I don't owe you anything as I authorized nothing, do you have my signature anywhere I authorized some work?" was her reply.  For the small sum we were charging, we decided it was easier to waive it as it wasn't worth the aggravation, so we did.

But somehow that was the trigger point for her rage. She threaten to post the worst review on earth on Yelp.  She then told us that everything we did for mother's day was just a scam to bring more work in.
Hugo, our service manager, was speechless listening to her rant and rave and could not understand what we could have done wrong to deserve such a verbal barrage.

After she left, I  asked Hugo "why do we give so much on single mothers day for so many years only to have it ruined by such few individuals?".

So next year when mother's day comes around. You can thank Sarah J for the fact we will be closed enjoying the day with our loved ones, instead of giving back to the community of single moms who so desperately needs it.
,,,,,,,,,,,I know by then, the anger will have disappeared (not the bad review), and we'll plan on doing it over again.