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Originally Posted by VWNate1
Don'cha just love DPO & DPM bodges you keep stumbling across ? .  |
You mean "Da Previous Owner" and "Da Previous 'Mechanic'"?
I don't like finding this kind of c**p. I strive to keep the vehicles I own and maintain done right and safe. It has been my experience that shortcuts lead to disaster at some point. If those wires had somehow shorted out and caused a fire that injured or killed one of my sons (his grandchildren) I'd've been pretty annoyed, to say the least. When I worked as a mechanic, it was especially important to me that the customer understood why I wasn't just going to "patch it together". That way lies great liability in a court of law. That attitude served me well when the BAR sent undercover people in to check on us. We were a state-licensed SMOG, Brake and Lamp station, and I held those licenses. I've turned away people asking me to "just buy off the brake failure ticket so they could go home and fix it", etc.
The only time I made a "blacksmith repair" was on a Sunday, when one of my friend's (drunk) dad drove over a long series of pylons on the freeway and trashed the shifting mechanism and valve body on his Nova. He brought it to me, and I managed to use a punch, hammer and files to get the parts back together so that it would shift from the lever inside the car again. I gave him a list of the parts that needed replacing, but I don't know what he ever did with it. The required parts and an explanation of why they were needed was clearly spelled out on the work order. He may have been my friend, but it protected all of us when the terms were completely spelled out.