[StirCrazy]

Originally Posted by dsaundry

.By the way..its coming, The "Mechanic" has taken a bad rap for a lot of years, not all deserved, now that vehicles are changing to computerized modular systems you need to study a lot just to work on them, let alone the equipment to work on them.

Ok, Ok, I agree with one but not the other, we are grease monkeys plain and simple, I think we actually need less skill to be a good Mechanic than we did 30 years ago, but we do need more expensive equipment which tells us what is wrong.

as for what dealerships charge and anyone who uses book value, you are going to get ripped off in >85% of the cases. A good example of this is when my truck got ripped off I got it back in less than good shape, I had two injectors gone (diesel truck) and I was on a course so I didn't have time to do them myself so I sent it to ford. Well they charged 1400.00 for two re manufactured injectors (who said they don't make money off parts) and 1000.00 for labor. well a week later I had another injector go, so instead of playing chase the injectors I decided to replace them all. I bought 8 injectors out of the US for 1300.00 for remans (less than the price of two from ford) and it took me a grand total of 3 hours start to finish to do the removal and installation, hmm ford is charging over 300/hour now?

I have a friend who has a shop here in town, just him as he can't find a deicent mechanic to hire. he charges 60 bucks an hour and doesn't charge if he is not actually working on the car, where dealers will charge even if they can't fix the problem. this is the biggest complaint I have as I took my old truck in about 3 years ago, it would shut off when you try start it intermittently. they charged me 2 hours labor because every 15 min they sent a guy out to start it and see what it did and they couldn't get it to do it. More than a little upset I took it home, looked on the Internet for 5 min and found the problem and fixed it in 10 min (cleaning the IAC) you would think a dealership or a mechanic would be able to figure out a very common problem in that year of vehicle.

I usually work on a lot older stuff myself, but I look forward to new stuff as with all the computers and stuff it is so much simpler to find out what is wrong, and only have a few extra wires to unplug to get at anything. Heck with the computer programs out there now you can do anything at home a shop can do, if you have the tools to do it and like getting scraped knuckles and such

Steve