Originally Posted by Hamwich
Originally Posted by JohnHarris

Whilst there are some very good home mechanics


Well you know what they say, when buying a car privately make sure you have a look at the owner's workshop. That will speak volumes as to how well the car has been maintained smile

I completely understand that some people prefer to have other people look after their car for them, there are all sorts of good reasons why this makes sense (lack of space or facilities, inexperience, no time, etc) but I do worry that people might buy a car believing that the presence of dealer stamps alone means that the car has been well looked after: whereas all too often it simply means the car has had the bare minimum of attention.

Your experience with your wheels being a perfect example. One job in the annual service is to remove all road wheels to inspect the tyres and re-grease the splines. Clearly in your case this hadn't been done - so what other service steps had also been skipped? The issue with rusting spark plugs in Ford engines is extremely well-known in the Morgan world, hence the numerous top cover projects we've seen over the years, and so there's absolutely no excuse for a main dealer to miss this either.



Absolutely spot on, there are good home mechanics and good garages, its a question of how comfortable you are with doing the work yourself and what facilities are available to you.. I find I'm better at dissembling something than putting it back together, in the past too often I don't know my own strength and usually bugger something up.......so formerly a high mileage driver when it comes to requiring reliable . safe motoring I tend to leave it to the professionals.

All maintenance jobs will have a manufacturers standard time to do the work, in my experience in main franchises many mechanics are paid a bonus on the hours they save (on the standard time) to complete a given job. Kind of encourages short cuts and skimping............in years gone by most BL garages workshops would have hundreds of oil cans upturned to drain the last vestiges of oil to collect for their own cars etc. That is until service windows became more the norm as so you could watch what was happening to your car and see the state of the workshop!.

The wife's Mini and MG Metro Turbo rusted before our eyes, the dealer was quite honest about the issues, being based in a coastal town with salty sea air they had one of the best paint shops around.

Last edited by JohnHarris; 22/08/22 12:45 PM.
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