Welcome to Bamford Rose, and another forum chat. This week’s forum chat is a screen dump of a picture which made me laugh when I saw it. Here it is. Any garage owner is going to laugh at the picture as well. But when you need to fix something, maybe you need to get something out of the way, then what you need to get out of the way breaks, maybe it’s sheared fixing, seized in fixing, and then you’ve got to repair what you needed to get out the way before you can actually repair the component you wanted to get to in the first place.

We do service in and out on the day here. Other jobs that we’re happy to do on the same day whilst customer waits is a clutch change on a V8. And 9 times out of 10, jobs go to plan. But there’s always that 1 time where something ridiculous as a sheared bolt on some nondescript fixing, which will cause you a huge delay, and the car can’t go out the same day, which causes a little bit of a logistical problem when the customer was waiting and expecting to drive off in his own car.

In this era of Aston’s the sorts of things that can push you out are, you know, on a relatively simple and straightforward brake pad change, the pins will be completely seized into the caliper, meaning that you got to take the caliper off to try and engineer a solution to get the pins out. Bleed nipples is a common one, especially if the car has been dealer serviced and the bleed nipples that haven’t been touched in years. But with the pins, with the bleed nipples, you know as soon as you put a spanner to them, or you try and tap out the pen for the first time, you just get that feeling straight away whether it’s going to budge or not. So, you pretty much know that you have to warn the customer that, if you carry on, it might mean that it’s an overnight stay if it goes wrong.

Steering suspension geometry fixings is another common one to share. And correction of that and refit of new components can be very time consuming. Anything clamp wise on the exhaust system, underlay fixing, wheel arch fixings, all these sorts of things you expect to break, and any garage has a stock of these anyway. So, those aren’t the sorts of things that are going to trip you up, because that’s expected and routine.

And not just mechanical, there are some electrical things that will go wrong. You know, simple and straightforward, reflash, update that’s needed for whatever reason of a transmission control unit, that can often go wrong, needing a new transmission control unit. If the car is not 3 years old and in maker’s warranty, and it’s pretty much routine servicing that’s going to be done on that type of car with the auto repair, and there’s nothing really that is going to trip you up on a new car.

But, you know, original DB9 V8 Vantage, you know, we’re clocking on for like nearly 16 years old and you know, they’re going to suffer 16-year-old car problems. Sometimes they’re not going to come apart nicely. And even the simplest of job might not go to plan and mean a bit of a reorganization of logistics. So, when you see a picture like this one, and a bolt that looks fairly nondescript, but just causes carnage in terms of time and logistics, then oh yeah, that’s possible. Hope you liked that forum chat, and we’ll see you on the next one.