What is the most expensive repair and the cheapest on your cars?

[xtriple]

As I'm currently worrying about how much I have spent/will be spending on my car, I wondered if anyone else had spent loads on a car repair?

 

Also, in a similar vein, who's had the cheapest?

 

My cheapest was when I bought a BMW 635 CSI that was a cracker other than the people selling it had been told the head gasket had gone. They'd had it for years and looked after it well but couldn't afford/didn't want to pay out for that. I put a new rad cap on it (£3 from the factors) and it was perfect!

 

My dearest, I have yet to find out....

[fordperv]

i havnt so much spent loads on repairs for my cars as i do them all myself, it just costs me parts to do the job

[NorfolkNWeigh]

My most expensive that I actually paid,rather than throwing the car away,like my 5 Series a couple of months ago, was £2,350 .

It was when the heater matrix failed and leaked into the fuses and control box for the aircon. I didn't realise for a couple of months and by then it had corroded to buggery.

This was in 2004 and was half what a Marque specialist in Olney estimated.

And, Xtriple , you don't want to know what car it was, but I will say if you smell antifreeze in the cabin don't ignore it!

Cheapest was 10p for a resistor,well actually £1 for 10, so I can fix 9 more Mercedes OM642 swirl flap motors instead of buying an £800 part.

[dugong]

Fixed the drivers' door on my 306 for the price of a scrapyard check strap (£2).

 

Largest one-off bill was for the Amazon's rear crank oil seal which snowballed into several other far more complicated jobs and ended up standing me the thick end of £1600.

[Ghosty]

Does the 'Old Man bullshitting a dealer out of £200 for dodgy tracking he fixed himself for free' story count here?

[MarvinsMom]

the biggest bill i had was on the XJR, and it came too i think £1600.

 

that was for a full service, new hand brake cables, hand brake pads, diff pinion seal, and a few other odds and sods.

 

smallest was on the metro, the brakes lights weren't coming on, a fiddle with the brake switch and they came back on! i guess that means free...

[Negative Creep]

Sorted a multitude of electrical faults with a Golf that the garage couldn't figure out by adding an extra earthing strap. However getting it through the MOT cost over £400 for my biggest ever bill (sold it for about £450 soon after, really thought that one through didn't I?)

[anonymous user]

Cheapest, probably bodging the dropped door with worn hinge pins, on a Morgan, by packing the hinge out with a bit of cardboard. (this became a repair when the cardboard was replaced with a piece of tin).

Most expensive I purposely don't remember.

[richardmorris]

I had a £1700 bill on my cx once- huge service ( all oils, filters etc, belts, fuel pump refurb and a lot of welding. Damn thing drove exactly the same afterwards.

 

Also had a 1000 euro bill in France for a new Siemens petrol pump on my C5. Worth more than the car was! And cost more than the holiday. It was about then I decided to get rid of the thing.

[twosmoke300]

Ha , when I saw the thread title my first thought was that xtriple is gonna win this 😄

[Bren]

Had a previous SD1 resprayed with new panels also being fitted. I think I paid £800 in 1997.

[danthecapriman]

Ha , when I saw the thread title my first thought was that xtriple is gonna win this 😄

I might have him beat yet!

 

My Mercury I imported turned out to have a duff engine, totally worn out and the rest of the car suffering from a 20 odd year lay up back in the US.

 

It's having a full nut and bolt rebuild of it's engine, literally everything stripped off, rebore, pistons, rings the lot. Every piece is being stripped, cleaned and either repaired or replaced. Everything is being painted and refitted to bring it mechanically back to as good as new condition.

If that's not enough the auto gearbox is getting a basic inspection, oil and filter change and new gaskets.

Brakes cleaned out and new fronts.

Testing, strip and repairs to the vacuum circuits for the engine and headlight doors, including new vac headlight actuators and repairs to vacuum reservoirs.

Plus loads of other bits and pieces and a new MOT.

 

So far I'm upto £7500 on the rebuild and car repairs, + another £750 odd on the vacuum actuators. It will rise further too as the engine is still being built!

 

It's not a cheap car in any respect, the repairs have now exceeded the amount I paid for the car in the first place. But it's being done to a very high quality by specialists so I actually don't mind paying it. At the end the car will be mechanically like new again.

[Six-cylinder]

I had a Jaguar 420G left on my drive with a blown head gasket by a very unhappy friend who was getting divorce. He said if I could fix it I could use it, the car had already had a head gasket and I did not fancy that job but a quick think about it and a secondhand vacuum operated heater valve stopped water getting into the oil! He took it back a year latter when he had somewhere to keep it very happy and I enjoyed the use of it for a year.

 

Expensive not sure I can tell, Mrs Cyl reads this!

[Tamworthbay]

My capri was sold as needing a new engine, I swapped two leads out and gave it a tune and it's sweet as a nut.

[EssDeeWon]

Very timely post xtriple...

 

Today I replaced a brake light bulb costing £1, but next month the belts and all the associated stuff is being done. This may well turn out to be one of the biggest bills ive ever had.....(im guessing £650 ish)

[HMC]

Cheapest- in 2007 the transmission oil cooler on my range rover went pop. 250 quid for a new one courtesy of rimming bros. Instead I borrowed a jubilee clip from my garden hose reel and 8 years and 20,000 miles later its as repaired and holding up fine.

 

Most expensive- had a load of bodywork done on an old 64 s type jag a few years back. I think it was good value for what he did but it came to 1600 quid.

[The Moog]

Most is only about £450 on Saab c900 for suspension renewal. Best is always free, often when buying a new car.

[barefoot]

Many, many years ago, I bought a seven year old 944 and just a couple of years later it needed a new back box & tail pipe.

I am back in the year of our Lord 1996 here and they wanted £380 for a back box - three hundred & fucking eighty pounds.

A used one from a breaker was fitted for £90 - still a fair whack I grant you - but it's still on to this day!

[Doctormop]

Cheapest repair was about two pence for a couple of inches of insulation tape used to fix a slightly cracked HT lead on a 1978 Peugeot 104 purchased for 80 quid in the autumn of 1990 from a right clever arse who had spent about twice the purchase price on a new distributor cap, spark plugs, plug leads and just about everything else electrical that a 104 had before and I quote "stitching a young wazzock up for 80 notes for a complete scrapper that would never run right again" I used to love beeping the horn and giving him the thumbs up at 7.20 each sub zero weekday morning as I zoomed past him as he stood at the bus stop throughout the long cold winter of 1990-91                                                                                                

[gordonbennet]

Last year, OMGCHG on the Benz started to put an oilstain around the header tank, getting progressively worse so put it in to my indy, they all seem to fail on the 6 pot straight 24v jobbies around 100k.

CHG alone is near enough an £800 job on those, but being a belt and braces twat as i am, i wanted the water pump changing and the oil cooler behind the oil filter casing replaced, indy also suggested doing the timing chain whilst it was dismantled, which seemed a good idea @ 100k.

That little lot came to about £1600 too with a few other small jobs added.

 

I've spent well over £3k on it in the last 2 or 3 years alone and it presented me with another £200 bill when i snapped a drive shaft clean in two couple of weeks ago, luckily he managed to find a good used part cos a new bastard was £750.

 

There's another bloody bill looming, dunno how but during the summer the screen has developed a crack.

 

Dare not add up everything its cost us over the last 12/13 years we've had it, probably its purchase price again, but it was a £50k car in 96 so it's a £50k car to fix even when its bloody old.

Thing is its the 320, and stacks of bloody things are unique to the 320's alone, such as front balljoints for all W124's £13 odd from dealer, on 320 they're part of the effin wishbone and you don't want to know the price.

Oddly enough though a genuine factory programmed plipper from the MB dealer was £60, which is bugger all compared to the prices i hear people being charged for lower priced cars.

 

I never get cheap repairs, every car we buy is either a change of model or one that only lasted 18 months or with the bigger engine before they replaced it or a combination of things, hence pattern parts can be a bugger.

[catsinthewelder]

I dropped off the Disco with a sence of financial doom as it had all the symptoms of HGF.  The garage asked for a deposit towards parts so I left him with £200.

 

I was well pleased to collect it the next week with £50 of change.  He had replaced the broken radiator/oil cooler, the header tank and most of the coolant pipes with good used stuff as well as the fluids for less than a new radiator would have cost me to DIY.

 

Most of my repairs are DIY and considerably cheaper but this struck me as a massive bargain.

[panhard65]

Biggest bills I ever had were for the restoration when I had my Jensen 541 2.5k for a respray then another 2.5k for the interior 4 hides of leather went in there. I did look lovely when done mind.

[dieselassist]

the most expensive fix ive incurred - for what it is- is to to have a locksmith called out to a garage in rathhoath in Dublin over the xmas period when the one key I had for the car randomly snapped in two mid length in the boot lock, at a filling station - it was an extended bank holiday- 27th of December I seem to remember -everywhere was  closed - I was dropping a mate to the airport, so he missed his flight... dispite me extracting both bits of the key from the boot lock barrel n carving a big gouge in my tumb in the process, the locksmith after taking 2 n a half hours to arrive, charged me €250 for a key he cut via his mobile key cutting grinder, plugged into a socket inside the filling station shop area... they key worked in the ignition, but I had to lock the car car at the airport....on seeing my mate off after he bought a new plane ticket, I returned to the car n the new key would not unlock any of the front doors - I had to pull the door handle to bits to gain entry to the car.... it was a mid 90s corolla hatchback....

 

...cheapest fix; I don't have much to top my brothers 'penniless motoring' approaches to fixing stuff - anomaly in his focus's side lights - one working n one not; fix- run speaker wire from the working live to the passenger side previously non working side... blown bulbs?? - rob bulbs from a scrap audi A4 I have.... 'brake lines  corrosion on previous owners nct attempt? clean down rust, on said lines n repaint with a tooth brush, after sanding off the previous testers yellow 'fail paint' on the surrounding underside....' - NCT passed first time... pressure switch on PAS pump leaking - replacement part €58 from ford; remove pressure switch n 'jamm up the hole' in the failed pressure switch with cut down  bit from a diesel pump governor shaft that's randomly the right thickness... etc etc he does service his cars n keep good tyres on them but doesn't believe in anything that goes wrong, has to be fixed the 'right way' - that's avoiding lateral thinking, apparently ....

[warren t claim]

This week I've paid an automotive locksmith £150 for 90 seconds work resetting an immobiliser fault. Gutted.

[Cheggers]

My most expensive car repair was £1200 for a new turbo, inlet fannymould and various other bits of pricey gubbins on my old Alfa 159.

 

Don't get me started on boats...£6k+ for a full rebuild of a 300bhp marine diesel (one of a pair).

[garethj]

I had an engine rebuild done on my Tatra 603 which was about £2500, that was back in the early '90s when £2500 was a lot of money

 

More recently the 924 cost me about £1200 for a replacement fuel tank, clutch and a few other things "while it was all apart".

 

Mrs_garethj's S Type was over a grand in labour trying to find the problem which made the battery drain overnight, then the garage owner took it personally and kept the car until it was fixed spending probably 5 grand in swapping parts and labour charges until he found the fault.  He didn't charge me for any of this and the repair was only a piece of heatshrink sleeve for £0.02 once he'd found the problem.

[pshome]

Fixed the leaking Tagora water pump by filling free magic swiss water into the radiator.

[New POD]

I fixed the rust on a Metro turdo by driving like an old granny, and failing to pull out into traffic, when it was obvious I could go. 2 rear quarter panels paid by 2 different peoples insurance in 4 weeks

[gordonbennet]

Remembered my cheapest fix, mk 4 Zodiac (Executive doncha know) and i'm on the way down to Eastbourne, Bexhill somewhere around there, going down either the A22 or 24 the temp suddenly goes up, all the water's gone and upon crawling under i can see the bloody radiator drain tap has unsoldered itself from the rad and vanished, bollocks.

Anyway, easy peasy to take the rad out so out it comes, just so happens i'm near a little service station but being the 70's the service station was also a minor motor factor, so bought meself a small pack of P40 isopon, the chopped glass fibre and resin sort, mixed a batch up and blocked the drain hole up.

 

Anyway whilst that's drying it comes apparent that the rad is a mirror image top/bottom, so when i put it back in i put the now sealed drain hole as the top and all is well with the world.

 

 

Fast forward to more modern cars and i helped my lad put a new heater radiator (don't effin well ask, never afuckingain) and a new main radiator in his 2001 Toledo, the heater rad required almost the entire dismantling of the forward interior and complete dashboard plus half the bulkhead engine side...take it from never ever take this job on with a modernish VW group car.

The main rad was another nightmare on its own, ended up removing bumper and half the front of the car.

[BavarianRetro]

New Stag engine in '88 was a couple of grand fitted.

I bought a Mark IV or Mark V Cortina, "needs a back axle, mate - fortunes". A wheel bearing had it fixed for about a tenner.