2001 Accord maintenance question / concern ...

All you need to do is what is in the manual. The vast majority of
things in there are cheap. .

My 97 accord requires a new timing belt at every 90K which is a
relatively expensive service. What does your service manual say? Is
yours due?

In terms of checking your brakes, that ought to be done when they
rotate your wheels. Thats because you need your tires rotated every
so often and its cheap to check when the tires are off the car. Just
takes a second!

$400 to check everything is rediculous! If you go through with it do
a test. Mark some part (like the wheels nuts or something) with chalk
in such a way that you can tell if they did the work (like took off
the wheels to check the brakes) or whatever.

Hey - I know some one who bought a very nice used accord from a new
car dealer. They told him that his tires needed balanced. He looked
at the rear tires and noted that there were no balance weights on the
rims. He had the new car dealer do the service and guess what. There
were no weights in the rear wheels. They never balanced them. Then
he gets into a long discussion with the service rep and he says that
long list of stuff that they say they do only means that they check it
and do it only if it is needed. Mind you though - every tire needs to
be balanced. Can you believe that. The #$@## new car dealer charge
an #$#@@ and a limb and then they don't even do the work that they
say they would do.

Heres another. Per my factory service manual when you change the
radiator fluid, the manual says to remove one or two bolts on the the
engine block. What happens is that when you drane the radiator fluid
through the drane cock at the bottom of the raidiator, there is a some
fluid that remains trapped in the engine block (a sort of low spot).
By removing the bolt, the trapped fluid dranes out the side of teh
engine. So I go back asking some of there service mechanics back at a
different honda dealer and they say the never (yep never) remove that
bolt. All they do is open the drain plug on the bottom of the radiator
and then put in new. Now its probably not a big deal because just a
little bit is left but gosh you would think it would be done right if
your paying the big bucks. By the way - replacing your own radiator
fluid is very easy to do (assuming you dont remove those 2 bolts).

On 31 Mar 2005 23:12:06 -0800, "Auto Inspector"
wrote:


 >can tell you that ANY aftermarket warranty is likely to be money thrown
 >away. OEM warranty is different but there are many little things that
 >need to be taken into consideration. For a basic well built (!!!) car

I once had one. I used it on a minor repair. I remember having to
leave my car at the shoppe an extra 4 hours because the mechanic had
to fuss around getting authorization to do some service.

Thinking about all that is involved it has to be expensive. The
price of the insurance includes the following:
a) Actuaries salary to analyze the risk to the insurance company
b) Salaries of individuals needed to honor claims and to
detect/prevent fraudulant claims.
c) Buildings / employee insurance to pay and house all those employees
d) Oh - yeah need some money from which to pay claims.

I am curious - when you analyze a car and come up with a conclusion
that the car has not been properly maintained: Are you paid per hour
or are you paid a fixed sum? How does that rate compare to the labor
rate they will pay for the actual repair?<!-- ~MESSAGE_AFTER~ -->