Anyone used ClickMechanic ?

As long as your 100% sure what needs doing then you’ll get a fixed price to sort it . The chaps who get work from it that use my place don’t really like it as it tends to be tightwads with no idea what’s wrong using it .

I wonder how much they want to rebuild the master on my 635.. and replace all the other screwed in bits? Seriously though, that price is supply and fit right?

it does seem even though it is just a GM alternator that they are extortionately expensive, labour will be a small part of that job though it is a little fiddly being at the back of the engine its not as bad as a Zafira with its really high scuttle panel and wings.

personally I;d take it off myself and find someone to fix it, or even fix it myself.

there's a lot on ebay really cheap though.

This. I can't for a minute imagine the frustration that would come from booking jobs in on the customers diagnosis and then having to try and convince them it's actually something entirely different.


For example we had a job recently, supply and fit a heater resistor. £30. That was off the back of another mechanics diagnosis, but we quoted and booked in and did what was asked.
That made the heater blow but only cold.
So rang customer and explained they needed a heater transfer valve which was a further £75 supplied and fitted.
Once that was done the heater worked on one side only. When they came to collect we were given more information which actually means the car needs a £6-700 head gasket replacement and coolant system overhaul.
Imagine trying to tell that to someone who had booked the £30 job in over the Internet with their expert accurate diagnosis, after which it would be your fault it hadn't cured the issue.

I wouldn't trust any online diagnostic type service at all... and I certainly wouldn't book a job using it. How can a fault be diagnosed accurately from a few bits of information relayed by the user? You could get a 'ball-park' idea of the fault i suppose, but no idea of the situation or events leading up to it without seeing and testing the car in person.
What do you do with this service? type in what you think is the fault? give a description of what happened or what happens when you do such and such? etc etc...
Ridiculous idea... 9 times out of 10 the customers self diagnosis is either a) totally inaccurate, or b) without any idea of the events leading up to a part failure.
On my first day working in a garage many many moons ago i remember my boss telling me to ignore whatever the customer told me they thought was wrong and to only listen to the facts of what actually went wrong that lead them to bring it to us in the first place, and to conduct my investigation accordingly.
I can't remember the amount of times someone brought in a 214 with a 'blown headgasket' only to discover it was the inlet manifold gasket that had gone( which chucks water into the oil and cylinders etc) ... If we were a disreputable garage we would have done the headgasket and charged them for that instead of fixing the inlet manifold for a fraction of the price . . .

Get it to a proper garage (not a big one like halfords or kwik fit) and get it diagnosed/done properly, or, as some have said, do it yourself. My grand scenic refused to start last year, totally dead, traced it to a burnt out starter, £140 for a replacement item, or £12 for the brush kit. Needless to say i bought the brush kit and did it myself, but the starter was a total to get to and would have cost at least another £100 in labour, coupled with the fact that any garage would just replace the item, not repair it ( time is money in a garage, literally) the job at a garage would have cost roughly £240 or more...I did it myself, cost me £12. no contest.

I can.

My current employment as in house Mechanic for an Agricultural Contractor means I'm often presented with broken farm machinery which has to be fixed immediately, and often comes with a 'farmer' diagnosis along with their advice as well as their surefire solution which will see it operating again in 5 minutes.

Occasionally they get it right, but 'head gasket failure' because a tractor has boiled off it's water isn't an uncommon one to be presented with.
Cleaning the radiator and oil coolers out usually cures that one.

'Just quickly weld this on here' when presented with a rotten piece of steel that's dropped off something is usually inviting having things thrown at them, especially when followed by the insistence that a bigger bit of metal welded over the top will cure it.

There is some amusement in welding that sort of stuff as requested and having them return a few hours later for the 'I told you it needed doing properly' speech.

14 months in they're starting to appreciate I do actually know what I'm talking about.

I used to use a mechanic who when I would bring a car over, would say, Do NOT tell me what you think, just tell me what it's doing wrong. Even though I actually knew - like if I rang up saying, can you change a wheel bearing for me - he would say ok, bring it over, then ask me what it was doing (noise) and take it from there.
I learned to trust him and he learned that I was usually right, but I could totally understand his method. He would cut you off if you started a sentence "I think it's the..."