Indeed. I don’t want anyone banging their heads against the wall to be enshrined in the Dope.
I did apologize in that thread, robby, for misreading the “'1988” / “08” and “2008” thing, and I’ll apologize again if I came across as harsh when you and others were trying to help. I know I have never insulted anyone on this board, yet I understand you are indignant. I hope we’re cool now?
One thing I must correct: I had done everything one can do above ground to try and get my first MOT pass on the first try in the, well, 8 years I’ve had a car in the UK. I did not expect them to fix anything or correct anything. Most of what I did involved replacing the left signal stalk, which would have been an absolute fail, assuring the rear seatbelts would retract (bicycle teflon lubricant), also a fail, and adding a tachometer (called a rev counter here) to the steering wheel shroud.
I did not expect the stalk would be redone (apparently, the one I bought had no control over the “rear fog light,” which approximates having a little flashlight on the back of your car, so a Rav4 doing 90 in pea soup fog has 1/10th of a second extra to try and avert crushing me).
As for “shoddy” work, I knew the small screw below the steering wheel shroud took me a long time to remove (as I explained, it’s 1" deep in a pinky-sized tunnel, and I needed a mirror to lock into it with a small Phillips. It took longer, a paper straw, and a kind of duct tape to put back on, yet since I had modded the shroud, I wanted to make sure if they looked for this screw, whatever it does, they’d find it.
I did not find it last night, using a flashlight (torch if you prefer) and a mirror. It was not there.
Also, yesterday, when I picked up the car, what you might consider the 11 o’clock spot was the position of the steering wheel if I wanted to drive straight on the road, and even then, the car was veering rightwards. ETA: I needed to drive my wife to an appointment with the doctor and felt the car was safe enough.
I set an appointment for this morning, specifically asking to at least speak with the owner, whom I had spoken to both when the garage did my clutch and when the car failed the other day. A very nice gentleman who has been in the business as a pro north of 35 years.
And you know what he did? He took the car into the garage and put that screw in. Pulled around, and invited me on a test drive to a nearby area with two parallel lines about 8 feet apart. “The alignment is off, and it’s pulling to the right,” he said. Return to the garage, and if it took him 15 minutes to put the screw in, it took 10 minutes to re-align it. For him, as I said in the thread, it must be like tying shoelaces. We do another test drive, and my blue tape is at 12 O’Clock.
We did not argue. It’s his employees whom he skillfully covered for.
As for the other comments, some are right and some shoddy, I mean not quite right. I’ll even add that sometimes my posts are too long and recount things I just wrote in other posts. I’ll try to correct that.
Can we just go with “mostly harmless,” and I’d like to think I’m a good guy; we don’t all have to be chums. I’d like to think nobody here dislikes me.
)