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I am sure many of you have had this happen to you over time I would like to hear some stories if you got them.
I am currently doing DEF tank heater replacements. Book time is 1.6 my worst time was 4 hrs first time I did it. My best is 2.5hrs and that is with everything laid out all my tools ready to go everything that can use air using air. I have magnetic trays for all the different bolts so it is just grab and go no hunting everything is right there and I am going full bore at it. I see no possible way to complete it in book time neither does 5 other mechanics that have looked at it. The combined years of experience being over 100yrs and still no way can be thought of.
What really gets me is it has killed 5 hrs of my proficiency and there will be plenty more of these exact same repairs to come.
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I’ve worked for Japanese car dealers and the warranty labor times are beyond horrible. Unless it’s changed they would .2 hours for the troubleshooting of an electrical problem.
A couple of years ago i looked up ALLDATA on a rear wheel bearing replacement on a Camry. The book showed .9 hours for one side.
It showed 1 hour even for doing both sides. How in the world does someone come up with that? .1 hours for one side….
A guy would be better off replacing one, running it out the door, and then bringing it back in under another repair order.I think all of that talk about book labor times being figured by real world mechanics is total bunk.
[quote=”Bluesnut” post=125953]I’ve worked for Japanese car dealers and the warranty labor times are beyond horrible. Unless it’s changed they would .2 hours for the troubleshooting of an electrical problem.
A couple of years ago i looked up ALLDATA on a rear wheel bearing replacement on a Camry. The book showed .9 hours for one side.
It showed 1 hour even for doing both sides. How in the world does someone come up with that? .1 hours for one side….
A guy would be better off replacing one, running it out the door, and then bringing it back in under another repair order.I think all of that talk about book labor times being figured by real world mechanics is total bunk.[/quote]
I can’t wait to begin my life as a Toyota Flat rate Technician!!!!! Ugh.I saw a BAMF tech we have do an engine rebuild. This guy is amazing, quick, proficient, doesn’t make mistakes and has the lowest come backs I’ve ever seen. He did a engine rebuild, took him 12 hours. Book times was 7. There was no way someone did that in 7 with just hand tools.
Another good one is installing a sun roof. Book time was 2 hours, it legitimately took 8 with side pillar air bags and all that nonsense.
You have to remember that the book time is just for the part to be replaced. It doesn’t (99% of the time) include everything else you have to do to get to it. Usually further down the list will be extra time to do each other step needed.
There’s also the .2 hours to replace any seal in the A/C system with .5 allocated for evacuation, recharge, and leak checks.
That’s not to mention the tendency to have a lot of repairs denied under warranty and no pay at all.
One customer pay job that went to hxxx (definitely not my fault) and repairing 4 Japanese cars under warranty (2 with multiple complaints) and not getting paid one single dime on any of them is the reason I threw in the towel at a dealership and went to work for myself.
This kind of stuff goes on all the time; I had reached the breaking point and said enough is effin’ enough.most of the guys here don’t even look at book times any more the vw warranty book times are a joke and there is no time for diagnostic only the repair so if you spend an hour finding the problem for it to be a loose wire you’ll get .1 .2 or something for all of it + you need to do the write up file a diss report send the diagnostic data to vw etc etc
even non warranty item suck most of the time as vw have fixed price repairs so we can only charge that amount for the repair the prices would be fine in a cheaper part of the country but where were located the labour rate is about 60% higher than in other parts due to the massive cost of land higher staff wages etc etc but making targets and staying profitable when you’re limited like that isn’t easy For example a timing belt book time is 5.5 hours for a certain car but max we can charge is equiv to 3.5 hours labour so even if you do it in book time we still lose out because we’ve only sold 3.5 hours.
Only decent money maker is Pdi’s and used car checks can get 160% efficiency on those if you want to make money.
I’ve never really had an issue with book times when I was flat rate. I left the dealership last year because I’m not going to rebuild warranty motors for 9 hours a piece for the next 10 years. Even on the warranty rebuilds, most of us broke even. Majority of our 22 techs averaged between 35-50 hours a week(on a 4 day work week) with a select few averaging 60-80. We also turned 100 cars a day on a slow day and 200+ cars a day in the summer, I’m not sure what the traffic flow for you guys is.
[quote=”brokemechanic3000″ post=125961]You have to remember that the book time is just for the part to be replaced. It doesn’t (99% of the time) include everything else you have to do to get to it. Usually further down the list will be extra time to do each other step needed.[/quote]
I was including everything. Broken down it is .4 to remove side skirts and 1.2 to change the the heater. They have not updated the skirt times since they re-engineered them to mount around the battery box.
[quote=”MDK22″ post=126014][quote=”brokemechanic3000″ post=125961]You have to remember that the book time is just for the part to be replaced. It doesn’t (99% of the time) include everything else you have to do to get to it. Usually further down the list will be extra time to do each other step needed.[/quote]
I was including everything. Broken down it is .4 to remove side skirts and 1.2 to change the the heater. They have not updated the skirt times since they re-engineered them to mount around the battery box.[/quote]
You got me thinking so I just pulled up the SRT manual and I think I may have found some if not a lot more time. It depends one whether we can actually charge some of this stuff or not so ty for making me look instead of just trusting my foreman.
Book times have become a massive joke!!! I’m sorry but any shop worth it’s salt will charge for EVERY .1 that the Tech spends finding and fixing the problem! If they dont they need to rethink their business model. *they will also FIRE all the clock milkers, without batting an eye*
My foreman is very good and normally on top the ball to an extreme. The problem is he is just overloaded at the moment. We just switched RO and back end systems 1 month ago. Mind you our foreman is our part runner, service writer, and foreman
Nobody’s even brought up the RUST yet!
I frequently will run into underbody bolts that the heads have turned into kind of a pine-coney rust knob kind of a thing. Sometimes I’ll have to go so far as to use a grinder to re-cut a hex shape into the head BEFORE having to torch the metal it’s threaded into red hot to have a hope in hell of taking it apart “properly”. Maybe it’s not going to come apart at all because it’s in a rusty turbo’s exhaust housing covered in layers of flaking salt over top of layers of flaking rust, like a toaster strudel from hell. No labor times for when you need to change a transmission and a crossmember you need to take out the way flakes apart like a perfectly baked pastry, leaving you wating for a part or cobbing it together enough to push aiside until parts come in then push it back onto the lift for free.
Then maybe it’s so ugly once it comes out that it needs to be replaced out of a bolt bucket and you need to spend the time searching for that because you don’t have a miracle parts dept onhand with giant rack of hardware bins with every kind of bolt, nut, and washer you could ever need on a car. No labor times for parts and hardware gathering. Even body shops charge flat rate hours for paints and materials completely separate-from and in-addition-to labor hours.
Isn’t it nice to do control arm bushings on a Chrysler only to have the bolts be seized into the nuts that are poorly secured up inside the a unibody cavity. Then you get to cut a window in the body so you can get in there and torch it apart, stripping any last hope of corrosion protection in a critical area. You bet there’s no labor op for rewelding the nut inside the body cavity, then abrasive blasting and repainting the whole area.
And we can’t leave out one of the champs, LEAF SPRING SHACKLES that pay .8 and the whole spring 1.2 hrs. Why are they even broken in the first place? They rusted completely apart! It looks so innocent to the uninitiated, but any vet knows those bolts mounted in double-shear configuration are seized in those bushings on the frame and in the leaf spring. You might wish you could just cut them apart with a sawzall but the upper one that a new one comes with the shackle is shrouded around with frame metal so there’s no room for back and forth action of a saw to work, and the bushing in the back of the leaf spring has to be saved anyway. No labor op for forcing that apart any number of different ways without breaking anything/needing to wait for new parts, especially if you have to get the bed up out of the way to attack those seized bolts straight-on.
RUST! RUST! RUST! RUST! RUST! RUST! rust! rust! rust! rust! rust rust rust …. rust……………….nngggghhhh…………
Working for Mercedes as a bumper to bumper tech but doing most of the heavy duty work. Mercedes was very fair with book time but around 2007 it went to down hill. but for the last year they have changed how we do book time. any time we have to do diag we clock on the clock as none time. lets say you have a check engine light you run the short test for .3 then you perform the required test and this is when non time kicks in you get paid for the time you put in for diag. when you perform the repair you get what the book time pays for replacing the faulty part. I am paid about 3.5 hr to diag and replace a thermostate on a 4cyl and it only takes about .5 to preform repairs. but some times the book does kick your ass. with conman repairs they look at the average time tech run from all over the world. this can be bad thing if you don’t run your time properly.
I don’t know how other manufactures do it but Mercedes let’s the tech perform all repairs from complete engine rebuilds not a long block or a cage motor. I had to repair a Mercedes CL63 engine do to a valve that dropped I had to replace the engine block, right cyl head, valves, and pistons and a lot of other things I was paid about 60 something hr.
and when ever a car comes in for service and lets say you find motor mounts weak, valve covers leaking, thrust arm bushings worn and what ever faults you find you just have the Forman add the lines.
when the car is out of warranty you take the book time and times it by 1.5. so if you have a up sale for 5 hr you charge 7.5.
[quote=”DOC BENZ” post=126586]Working for Mercedes as a bumper to bumper tech but doing most of the heavy duty work. Mercedes was very fair with book time but around 2007 it went to down hill. but for the last year they have changed how we do book time. any time we have to do diag we clock on the clock as none time. lets say you have a check engine light you run the short test for .3 then you perform the required test and this is when non time kicks in you get paid for the time you put in for diag. when you perform the repair you get what the book time pays for replacing the faulty part. I am paid about 3.5 hr to diag and replace a thermostate on a 4cyl and it only takes about .5 to preform repairs. but some times the book does kick your ass. with conman repairs they look at the average time tech run from all over the world. this can be bad thing if you don’t run your time properly.
I don’t know how other manufactures do it but Mercedes let’s the tech perform all repairs from complete engine rebuilds not a long block or a cage motor. I had to repair a Mercedes CL63 engine do to a valve that dropped I had to replace the engine block, right cyl head, valves, and pistons and a lot of other things I was paid about 60 something hr.
and when ever a car comes in for service and lets say you find motor mounts weak, valve covers leaking, thrust arm bushings worn and what ever faults you find you just have the Forman add the lines.
when the car is out of warranty you take the book time and times it by 1.5. so if you have a up sale for 5 hr you charge 7.5.[/quote]
Nice, we get paid nothing for diag time at my dealership. We lose our shirts on warranty work, and have service writers that cut techs hours to make a sale more appealing to customers. I need to work for Mercedes.
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