My car is in the shop for service. Dude reckons my "harmonic balancer" is shot.
He wants $1800 plus labour.
Anyone know WTF it is ?
I'm a few months out of new car warranty and I'm :? at the merkin.
They f**ked up a simple installation of a glowplug (diesel) and had to send the head off at their expense. Now they have "found" a $3k problem. makes me wonder if they are shafting me.
This harmonic balancer gadget has something to do with the drive shaft :lol:.
My daughter's keyboard has one. Shouldn't cost that much to fix.
Sorry mate, never heard of one in a car. No idea.
Suity
Have A SAAB Turbo Convertible. Early 90's and a year or so out of warranty it got a power steering oil leak running down the steering shaft. The SAAB dealer/service centre in Artarmon quoted us almost $4.5k to service and replace all the parts.
Took it to an American client who ran a large fleet of Taxis he owned out of the Petrol Station he also owned on Old South Head Road Bondi (near intersection of Blair St & O'Sullivan Rd and opposite the Australian Golf Course).
The Greek mechanic who I became joke-about mates with checked it out by washing down the engine including the whole bay and we took it for a 15 minute drive. We then found the issue was an oil ring which cost us under $30.00 and a few hours labour. Got the whole job done for under $200.00.
From that day onwards I took a much closer interest in all the cars I owned. Back then we had around 10 (8 for business and 2 for family).
We started purchasing extended warranties on all the new service cars and only ever bought second hand family cars around 3 months old, usually Subaru Outback's. Until I let go of my business in 2005 I reckon I saved upwards of $100k on car maintenance thanks to the extended new car warranties which cost around $800 per car and with me taking a more closer interest in all the cars, in fact with f**king everything in the business and @ home.
I ran a large service sales business in office automation and it was a huge wake up call for me realising the amount of shonks out there. No longer cared who it was - kept asking tough questions and haggled on pricing (or shopped around for parts). Came to see after almost 20 years in business there are not many people you can really trust in any service and sales industry.
Built great friendships with a few but mostly did not give a f**k who any of them were and who they worked for. Mrs Casper reckons I've saved our family well beyond $400k because of this attitude. You do have to put the hours in shopping around, asking questions and building up a large data base of this information which we referenced over and over again, even to this day. We still save a huge amount of $$$$ because of the homework hours I'm putting.
Good on you for putting the effort in Gronk, it will always pay off.
