Even a few years ago, back in Brizzle, I walked into a quick fit, explained I had need of some 1.5″ exhaust to knock up something to make the exhaust for my minor (before I had a ‘proper’ exhaust) and not only did they hand me their skip and say ‘go dig’, they also said if it needed welding to bring it back.
Asking for a ‘temporary repair’ was not akin to saying ‘please bow down and kiss my shoes’. It did not result in looks of horror, fear and shock.
Today I toured Slough asking for such a thing. A temporary repair. Even lopping out that entire front silencer and replacing it with a straight section of 1.5″ tube. This would require: Taking some 1.5″ tube, whopping the end of it on their little expander, and then chopping the old one off just after the silencer and sticking the two ends together. A task that most average CDT school classes could have done (at least back when I was at school).
Apart from the phrase (which I’m somewhat sick of hearing) ‘We can’t do that anymore’ (or it’s equally popular alternative – “we don’t do that anymore”) I also got that you couldn’t weld stainless steel, that my three piece* exhaust is a ‘one piece item’ and that ‘it’s made as one piece’ and that you couldn’t ‘just take a section out’ and replace it with a straight one.
Who are these guys? What happened to real exhaust fitters?
It’s now too late for me to attempt a temporary repair today, one place did at least concede that it might be possible (although they wouldn’t do it) and gave me an old section of 1.5″ exhaust, so I should be able to knock up something to keep the car on the road until Option E comes into effect. I’m trying to decide if I should take the bike today and save the Minor’s current temporary repair for tomorrow morning (which seems sensible to me, but cold).
I think it’s very sad, years ago mechanics were skilled people who could strip and rebuild anything from a dynamo to an entire engine. They could diagnose faults without computers. They could actually *do* something other than take off a broken bit and replace it under instruction from a computer.
Back when I did work experience and whoever it was at my school had a laugh and put me down to work in a garage** the guys there knew how and when to replace, repair and to bodge. It wasn’t *that* long ago.
What happened to these people? What happened to these skills. These places are now very depressing. When a part time mechanic is better at fixing things (and sadly, probably fitting things) than the mechanics she’d normally pay to do things then the world is a sad place.
* It’s actually four, but described as three.
** Who were very shocked, thinking they’d got some little school age numptie who’d get in the way for a week, the first day he took me out on a test drive and asked me how a clutch worked and was for. He got a nice precise explanation including the basics of the structure of the clutch. Then he discovered that I knew what a ‘long weight’ and a ‘glass hammer’ were, and eventually we settled into me poking the underside of cars doing MOT’s and helping with servicing.
