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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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Sounds like a sweet deal on the Benzes. The Japanese cars I’ve worked on under warranty don’t pay squat. If there’s an electrical problem the tech may (and it’s a very shaky coin flip) get .5 hours for any diagnostics and repairs.
Got an A/C line leak? A whopping .2 hours with .5 for evacuation, recharge, and leak check.Squeak or rattle that took 2 hours to find and fix? Again, .2 hours.
Got a .3 job that takes 4 hours because of severe rust? You get .3.
The entire system bites.
[quote=”Fopeano” post=126523]Nobody’s even brought up the RUST yet!
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”.
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…………[/quote]
You’ve all got me convinced that I’ll never work for a dealership. I want to throw something at you that might save you some time and frustration.
You can usually work some magic heating the bolts themselves. I’m sure you’re thinking it’s counterintuitive, but what’s going on is that you’re sending heat down the length of the bolt and expanding the bolt itself. This can help break up some of that rust you worship and adore in that Fopeano kind of way. You don’t need to liquefy the bolt, just get it glowing a little so you know you’ve sent some adequate heat down the bolt. I’ll usually let a bolt head get a little orange, let it cool until the glow is gone, and then heat it up to a little orange again. Then let the bolt cool to a point you know you can get belligerent with your wrench, ratchet, or impact. This tactic has saved my ass a hundred times with stuck toe adjusters in pick your rear suspension. Obviously, it’s going to be a little different for a shackle bushing since the center sleeve might have separated from the rubber. I’m suddenly reminded of how much I don’t miss Crown Vic trailing arms. You should find yourself a Ford Ranger pickup. They just rot the entire mounts out off the frame and then you sell them springs, shackles, and mounts and you get about a day’s labor out of it with brand new nut & bolt hardware.
Now that I think about it a little, maybe it’s just time to stop dealing with the shackles by themselves and upsell the springs & mounts? What are you replacing shackles on with so much manic rust flavored depression?
[quote=”no_common_sense” post=127626]Is there a rescue service we can call on your behalf?[/quote]
That would be a service training consultant.
Between my service manager and the 2 advisors, they have a total of 0 minutes of service training and 0 minutes of service experience. They are very smart fellas and that’s why the thing holds together, but you can’t expect much with no training and experience. Each and every job is priced and sold on a customer-specific basis, there are no policies and procedures for anything we do.
The past couple of months, I’ve told them all (individually and together) that the only thing that’s going to improve the situation is if they admit they’re a mess and hire a paid consultant to come in and train them all for a few months. I’m sure you can imagine how far that has gone.
On the plus side (I guess), I’ve been able to become a bigger asshole co-worker than I ever thought possible. I continue to impress myself with how difficult I can be for a service advisor to deal with. I normally just have to start out with the most incendiary question you can ask of them “so how much diag did you quote for this?” DING! and there’s the bell and round 1 of this exhibition bout is underway!
No one in the industry that I am aware of has book times for rusted bolts, galvanic corrosion, wires with high impedance due to corrosion, wires with poor connections, wires with too much voltage drop built in from the factory, re-engineering anything so it actually works, drilling out anything (times are completely unrealistic), intermittent problems, repairing problems left behind by other “mechanics”, having to heat and/or cool anything, cascading repairs ie fix one coolant leak two more appear due to increased pressure in system, fixing the route cause vs band-aiding when band-aiding is company policy, having to clean out the vehicle before being able to work on it, putting on or taking off personal protective safety equipment, etc.
I could go on and on but, at this point I would rather not piss people off. Warranty rarely if ever allows t-time aka time taken and if they do it is only when it has been in and out of dealerships.
[quote=”MDK22″ post=127960]having to clean out the vehicle before being able to work on it, putting on or taking off personal protective safety equipment, etc[/quote]
Those cars that show up with the landfill in the passenger seat, the entire rear seat and floor, and half the driver’s floor… :sick: No wonder you’d want to account for time to put on the PPE. It’s so weird being dirty for a living and not feeling the need to wash until the moment you feel your skin peel away from that viscous diet Coke that’s everywhere and you suddenly have a six month old french fry stuck to your forearm. I have occasionally made a customer clean out their car before I worked on it. The look of shame is awesome when you walk past an empty 55 gallon trash bin in favor of a small dumpster. Is anybody else having problems with customers bringing in their cars with windshields so dirty that they block out all the sun’s harmful UV rays and your hopes of seeing anything in front of you?Well doing what I do it is more the overturned piss jugs that have seeped into the foam floor padding, the cigarette ash that is so thick covering everything you swear you smoked 2 cigarettes by just opening and closing the door, and/or that sticky stuff on the floor that you pray is sprite.
Found a great one today had a big alambra in for a few items that fell under are “It’s fixed” pricing great for the customer but guess who gets shafted?
Looked at the invoice and saw it was a $1300 bill thinking great will get some good hours for it, will i fuck
Front pads Fixed price 0.3
rear discs + pads 0.9 (electric handbrake)
replace tyre 0.1
Brake fluid change 0.3 ( not great but even worse as our machine is broken atm and we have to do it the old school way till it’s fixed)
AC regas 0.5
and coolant flush 0.3
Fixed price kills us with our high labour rate not much we can do about it and no one really cares as it’s the techs getting shafted.
Those are the worst labor times I’ve ever seen or heard of. What does “It’s fixed price” or “Fixed pricing” mean?
Basically it mean the prices are set by the manufacturer and include parts + labour.
We get doubly screwed by it one because of our location is very expensive and labour rates run about $160/h
and 2 because the it’s fixed is not car specific the $160 brake job is the same on a little city car with $30 pads or a big mpv with $100 pads.
Those are some pretty pathetic labor times. They rank right up there with the book time on some Toyota Camry rear wheel bearings I looked up a few years ago.
It showed .9 hours for one side.
It showed 1 hour flat for both sides.I would sure like to have a word or three with the people who dream this stuff up.
Honda warranty rates suck. All warranty rates suck nut I remember a few that were way off from what any other source said. The one that sticks out in my mind was doing a short block on an Odyssey. Warranty was something like 10.1 and alldata showed 19 something. And yeah, electrical diag flat rate is a joke. Had to chase a gremlin once that cost me half a day. Writer managed to get me .9. Oh well. It’s how flat rate goes.
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