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Car in the garage

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philb

What does everyone do when their vehicle is in the garage? Mine went in & has took 3 weeks to fix. I didn't know at the outset how long it would take & kept expecting it to be fixed in the next day but just wondered what others do in this situation? Hire a van? Go to trad & walk around with ladders on their back? Have a few weeks off?

 
Wondered myself about the 3 weeks....longest I've gone was 2 days for a new clutch.


He hasn't given us enough info on this.

One of the local lads owned a M/B Vito and one of the injectors failed. He took it in to have it sorted and in the process they broke the injector off in the head trying to remove it as it was seized solid. (It was a local garage so there maybe another story he doesn't know about - ie, did they have the right equipment the remove the injector, etc?)

So they had to remove the head, strip it down and sent it in to a specialist for the broken injector to be removed.

The process is that the cylinder head is very slowly heated up to a very high temperature over the course of a couple of days in a large kiln. This is to prevent the head from warping. At a certain temperature the broken bit just falls out. Then they start the gradual process of reducing the temperature back to ambient temperature. That whole process takes longer than a week apparently.

Because of the costs involved they wait until they have a lot of heads to do. If you are the last one in then it won't take as long. If you are the first in line then chances are you might wait a few weeks before they get a 'full load.'

My mates van was off the road for 4 weeks. He went back to trad but I took him out on my van to clean a few that had to be done wfp.

I suggested he buy a 'new' van so he could carry on with his work. Personally, I would have scrapped the van as it was rusty anyway but his funds were limited at the time so he waited.

The van was never the same afterward and he scrapped it a couple of years later after spending a fortune on it keeping it going.

And he replaced it with a newer Vito.

 
It took 3 weeks as diagnostics showed pressure sensor on fuel rail had gone. Part took a couple of days to arrive to find it was wrong one, new part ordered a few days later fitted but didn't solve the problem, a few days later after further diagnostics thought might be egr valve so they cleaned that to find still not solved & discovered it was a suction valve - few days for the wrong part to arrive and then a few days for the right part to arrive & finally fixed.

from the beginning they said it wasn't clear exactly the problem but each time it was thought the problem was identified & would be fixed in the next day or two. It didn't have a massive impact to my round as I'm still in transition between jobs however today is my last day of employment so thinking more about from now on really.

 
What van and age is it? 

Without a doubt hire a van. 

It will cost you you a few hundred a week, but atleast your making money and most importantly servicing all your customers. 

 
It took 3 weeks as diagnostics showed pressure sensor on fuel rail had gone. Part took a couple of days to arrive to find it was wrong one, new part ordered a few days later fitted but didn't solve the problem, a few days later after further diagnostics thought might be egr valve so they cleaned that to find still not solved & discovered it was a suction valve - few days for the wrong part to arrive and then a few days for the right part to arrive & finally fixed.

from the beginning they said it wasn't clear exactly the problem but each time it was thought the problem was identified & would be fixed in the next day or two. It didn't have a massive impact to my round as I'm still in transition between jobs however today is my last day of employment so thinking more about from now on really.


I'm afraid that this is becoming a more regular issue. Even the main dealers don't know where to look when problems arise. The lady next door experienced that with her Fiat 500 with Fiat. Fiat wanted to try this, and then this, and then this and we can't guarantee that it will solve the problem.

My son's Peugeot Partner van suddenly wouldn't rev above 2000rpm and was pouring out black smoke from the exhaust. The Peugeot main agents had it for 4 days before they decided to remove the exhaust. It was cured. So they flushed the catalytic convertor out and reassembled it - same problem. It ended up to be the back box which they replaced and the problem sorted. That took a week altogether.

We worked off of my van.

My van spends a week a year in the panel beating shop getting rust repaired. We can use son's van but it not a twin operator system like mine is so much more difficult.

 
Took them 30 minutes to diagnose my black smoke problem after a couple of garages took guesses.

Plugged his computer into the van and bingo...nothing more serious than a split pipe.

Was told it could be EGR valve or some other thing by 2 garages.

Took the plunge and paid £100 at a diagnostic centre and sorted straight away.

 
Took them 30 minutes to diagnose my black smoke problem after a couple of garages took guesses.
Plugged his computer into the van and bingo...nothing more serious than a split pipe.
Was told it could be EGR valve or some other thing by 2 garages.
Took the plunge and paid £100 at a diagnostic centre and sorted straight away.
 
Guess I'm lucky my garage do my diagnosis for free


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Took them 30 minutes to diagnose my black smoke problem after a couple of garages took guesses.

Plugged his computer into the van and bingo...nothing more serious than a split pipe.

Was told it could be EGR valve or some other thing by 2 garages.

Took the plunge and paid £100 at a diagnostic centre and sorted straight away.
That is usually a split pipe either between turbo and egr or on the air intake side of it all

Mine was doing that the other day

Quick fix of duct tape round the turbo to egr hose and going to local van breakers this weekend

Easy when you know what you are doing but can take ages with so called "mechanics" who can't work out the problem lol

 
Buy an OBD reader online for less than £20 that connects to your phone via wifi or Bluetooth. At least that way you may have a head start with diagnosis. I keep one in the car and one in the van just in case

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Does it actually work?

The OBD ports were half open to cars quite a while back but is not open on my Citreon Relay 04 plate hdi to anything other than Citroen's own Lexus computer system.

There was so much drama over these OBD ports. To allow competition the EU legislated that OBD ports be open to all readers. However the EU also made the manufacturers responsible for emissions control over their product over the life time of the vehicle (the reason why a new catalytic convertor can only be purchased when linked to your registration number.) So they wanted the best of both worlds where the manufacturers say they can have 1 or the other, not both.

So the manufacturers had a 2 tier system on the OBD port. The top tier was open to all with a card reader giving basic fault finding code errors, but the lower tier was only open to the dealer workshops for deep down nitty gritty stuff.

The remap boys cracked the system rather quickly though. The only answer the govt has is to make it illegal to alter any system that controls emissions, ie., removing dpf and catalytic convertor innards and reprogramming the vehicle to look like they are there and functioning correctly.

 
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Mine was in for a week and I hired a van.

I then went and bought a newer hopefully more reliable van as the one I had kept costing me days off. 

I have about 15 barrels and a backpack so I could use them In my car if the van was off the road again. But if more than a couple of days I would hire a van again. 

 
I've just got my van back today after them having it for three weeks. They were only fixing the central locking on it but had to take the wiring loom out and inspect it. Luckily it's a relatively new 15 plate and I could use a courtesy van and used my trolley system.
Three weeks in my opinion is a joke but what can you do other than ring them every day and hope they get sick of you.

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