RaR

[purrpill]

I am afraid of mechanics. I hate the feeling of being "had." My "check engine" light went on the other day and the details of the saga are boring, but yesterday morning I was faced with "well, I don't know what you were told on Saturday, but that price was just the diagnostic and won't go towards repair (which is not what I was told on Saturday)"

Comments

[6opou]

I will say that Flamingo is quite badass. They have a reputation of being expensive, but in checking, they've been the cheapest option in many cases. They're awesome about telling you what's going on if you ask, too.

[mutantgarage]

Lots of place will read out the codes for free.
It's just plugging in a diag reader to a port under the dash or hood.

Now interpreting the codes and calling out a part, that's worth $80 or more.
Some of the codes are pretty obscure. But if you can get someone to give you a printout, google can tell you a lot. Call around and ask them if they will do a code readout and dump for you. It's worth a few $$ (not $80 though).

I was getting an EGR pressure error on my Toyota, it turned out that the EGR valve was all clogged up with carbon, normally it's about $300 to replace, I
just shot it full of gumout and scraped a lot of spooge out of it and
it's been OK for the past couple of years.

[gosaru]

good for you for getting your money back!

where did you go anyway?

[purrpill]

it was Groovy Auto on N. Lamar. I feel less like bad mouthing them since they gave me my money back. They may have done a fine job with the repair, I just got mad that what I was told on Saturday was no longer true on Monday. I feel bad for the Monday guy though since he had to deal with me!

Ray's Garage

[winwin]

Sarah and I have used Ray's garage for 6 years, they are totally honest and have done things for us that I would never have expected a mechanic to do.

An example: We had an electrical problem with our Saturn that took forever to diagnose; they spent probably 20 hours looking into it. The owner, Peggy, told us to just let her hold onto it and they would use any downtime to pull the car apart. End of the whole deal she only billed us for 3-4 hours of labor plus the parts.

They are totally up front about everything and follow through on anything they've ever told up.

The last time I was there I talked to another customer who had been using them for 30 YEARS. And that is not the first person that I have met there that had a 10+ year relationship with them.

The only negative I can say is that they are not the cheapest game in town, but for the piece of mind they are well worth it. The only other mechanic I have trusted this much was when my best man used to work on my cars.

Hope that helps!