Hi Am i the only one who seems to be cursed when taking a car to a garage.

I put the Octavia in to a local garage thats on my way home from work and they always look busy so i thought (and i should know better) that they must be good...will come to that later.

Anyway due to my track record with garages i always take to double checking the work they do as soon as i get home. so a simple arb bush and droplink change has resulted in me taking the car back to them (because in a dispute I've legally got to give them a chance of fixing a mistake) because they've clearly kicked the lift arms under the car and under the FOS the arm has smacked into the floor rail and taken a chunk of underseal off which i hope they are now redoing.

Prior to that ive taken my previous cars into a ford main dealer and they managed to fit directional tyres on back to front (despite direction arrow and rear tyres fitted the correct way) and they bent the sill in the process.

I've had a gearbox on my old lupo seriously messed up by a so called transmission specialist in east Manchester it went in for a 3rd gear synchro replacement and they proceeded to change iirc three of the ratio's because it was easier. I noticed checked and proved they changed it so demanded they put it right much to their winging so upon picking the car up for a second time i discovered they had over torqued the lower mount bolt and cracked the casing and didn't seal the end cap correctly so it was leaking fluid. Resolved it out of courts but was sorely tempted to report them to the press etc.

I have had a ball joint and disc damaged at a garage (from good garage scheme) doing a wheel bearing replacement and they didn't do the wheel alignment afterwards so the car was all over the place.

A well known garage forgot to do up the centre clamps on a new exhaust so it fell of 50 miles down the road.

I should know now to only use main dealers or proper specialists as they seem to of been all good so far but it leads me to worry about the state of most of the other cars on the road i seriously doubt Joe blogs will of noticed half the problems i have noticed with independent garages. even the good garage scheme has let me down which proves to me that your average customer reviews should be almost completely transparent disregarded?

Sorry for the rant and i don't mean to taint those honest scrupulous workers that hold the mantle for the great garages out there. But i would like to know if anyone else has experienced incompetency on this level?

I generally been lucky. But until recently I used the same father and son garage for 10yr and he came with a personal recommendation.

I've moved away from that area now but I still consider them them. I needed the teves unit replaced ion my car recently and I used a local VW specialist that was recommended by the repair shop that did a fix on the car a few years back. He's got a few good comments around the web too. Seemed like a decent chap so we'll see what happens in the future.

When I had a bike and put it in to get serviced they forgot to put the clip on the fuel feed pipe so it dripped petrol onto the engine and the exhaust. Luckily I was only riding 500m home and smelt the petrol the next day otherwise that could have been a rather unfortunate ride. I didn't bother to complain but he never got any more business.

Even some main dealers are not very good (speaks from experience). Dont assume because they are a dealer they know what they are doing or will do the job correctly.......even the most basic jobs have not been done correctly in some cases.

Always use recommended specialist mate, my mate works for a local ford garage so I've started using them, as he knows how fussy I am with my motors so makes sure it's looked after 100%.