Repairs
Brakes, suspension, cambelts, clutches and exhausts, plus a free health check, air con and four-wheel laser alignment. Priced once we have seen the car.
General repair work, done properly.
Over thirty years in the trade, hands-on across the most common, and most safety-critical, repairs.
No quote until we have seen the car.
The same symptom can have more than one cause, so we find the fault first and price the job on what is actually wrong with it.
How to tell when each of these needs looking at
What the part actually does, and the warning signs you can spot yourself before it becomes the expensive version.
Brakes
Your pads squeeze against the discs to slow the car, and both wear down every time you use them. How fast depends far more on how and where you drive than on age: stop-start town driving, a heavy right foot, and a loaded car all wear pads quicker than steady motorway miles. Most manufacturers reckon on somewhere between 25,000 and 60,000 miles from a set, which is a wide enough range that mileage alone tells you very little. A proper check tells you where yours actually are.
- A grinding noise when you brake — usually means the pads are already gone
- The steering wheel shakes as you slow down
- The pedal feels spongy, sinks toward the floor, or is slow to bite
- The car pulls to one side under braking
- The brake warning light is on
- It takes longer to stop than it used to
- A burning smell after a long descent or heavy braking
- Brake fluid that is low, or dark and dirty rather than clear
Worth having looked at once a year regardless. A Full Service includes a wheels-off brake inspection; an Interim covers a visual check.
Suspension
Springs and shock absorbers keep your tyres pressed onto the road surface. When they wear, the tyre starts skipping rather than gripping, which lengthens stopping distances and wears the tread unevenly. It is a slow failure, so the car feels normal to the person driving it every day. Usually it turns up as a tyre wearing out early, or on an MOT, long before the driver notices anything.
- The ride feels bouncy, or the car keeps moving after a bump
- The nose dives noticeably when you brake
- Knocking or clunking over potholes and speed bumps
- Tyres wearing unevenly across the tread
- The car sits lower at one corner
- It wanders or feels vague at motorway speed
Cambelts
The cambelt keeps the top and bottom of your engine turning in time with each other. On most modern engines there is no warning before it goes, and no coasting to a halt: the valves and pistons meet, and a belt that costs a few hundred pounds to change becomes an engine strip. This is the one job on the car that is genuinely worth doing early rather than late.
- Usually nothing at all — which is exactly why it is done on interval, not on symptoms
- If anything: a rattle or whine from the belt end of the engine, or difficulty starting
The interval is specific to your engine, not a general rule. Most fall somewhere between 60,000 and 100,000 miles or 4 to 7 years, whichever comes first, and some are longer. Age matters as much as mileage — a ten-year-old belt on 40,000 miles is as much of a risk as a five-year-old belt on 100,000. Check your handbook, or give us your registration and we will look up the schedule for your car.
Clutches
The clutch is the friction plate that lets you connect and disconnect the engine from the gearbox. Like brake pads it is a wearing part, and like brakes its life depends almost entirely on use: town traffic, hill starts and towing all take their toll. Several of the symptoms below can also be a hydraulic or cable fault rather than the clutch itself, which is a much smaller job. Worth knowing which before anyone quotes you for a clutch.
- The revs rise but the car does not speed up to match — the classic slip
- The biting point has crept up towards the top of the pedal travel
- Judder or shudder as you pull away
- The pedal feels heavy, spongy, or stays down
- Crunching or resistance selecting gears, especially first and reverse
- A burning smell after heavy traffic or a hill start
Exhausts
The exhaust carries gases away from the engine, cuts the noise, and cleans up what comes out. It lives underneath the car in the weather and salt, so corrosion gets it eventually. The emissions and noise it produces are both tested at MOT, and the system has to be complete, secure and free of serious leaks to pass. On a diesel the DPF and on any petrol the catalytic converter are the expensive parts, and both can be damaged by a fault elsewhere, so it is worth finding out what caused it rather than just fitting another one.
- It has got noticeably louder, or there is a droning or roaring under acceleration
- Rattling from underneath, especially at idle
- Smoke from the tailpipe, or fumes you can smell inside the car
- A drop in power or a rise in fuel use
- The exhaust is hanging low or you can see corrosion at the joints
- An engine light with the exhaust or emissions system named
The bits that catch people out.
None of this is a sales pitch. It's the stuff we end up explaining in the office most weeks.
Brake fluid is hygroscopic, which is a technical way of saying it absorbs water out of the air over time, even sitting still in a sealed system. Waterlogged fluid boils at a lower temperature, and fluid that boils turns to vapour, and vapour compresses in a way that fluid does not. That is the long pedal you sometimes hear about at the bottom of a steep hill.
It is generally changed on time rather than on symptoms — around every two years is the usual figure, but your handbook has the number for your car. It is one of the cheapest jobs on the vehicle and one of the easiest to leave for a decade without noticing.
A pedal that feels spongy usually means air in the lines. A pedal that sinks toward the floor is a different matter entirely and means stop driving it and call us.
A blowing exhaust is a noise problem right up until it is not. If the leak is in the wrong place, exhaust gas can find its way into the cabin, and the dangerous part of it — carbon monoxide — has no smell at all. You cannot rely on noticing it.
That is the reason a blowing exhaust is worth dealing with quickly rather than living with. The noise is the least of it.
Gases leave the engine at the cylinder head and get collected by the exhaust manifold, which funnels every cylinder into one pipe. From there they pass through the catalytic converter, which cleans them up, then the silencer, then out of the tailpipe. The whole run is held together with clamps, hangers and gaskets, and it lives underneath the car in the salt and the weather.
The silencer is the interesting bit. It is not packing or padding — it is a tuned set of tubes that bounces the engine's sound waves back on themselves so they cancel each other out. That is exactly why a corroded exhaust goes loud so suddenly: a hole lets the sound escape before the cancelling happens. The noise is the symptom of a hole, not of "a worn silencer" in some gradual sense.
It is also why short-trip cars rot faster than motorway ones. The silencer sits furthest from the engine and runs coldest, so acidic condensation collects in it instead of being burned off by a good run. Age matters less than how the car gets used.
A roar usually means the silencer has gone. Hissing points to a crack in the manifold or a pipe, or a leaking gasket. A chugging sound suggests a blockage somewhere in the system. A rattle under the car is often the system sitting misaligned, and a loud metallic vibration is usually something touching the pipe, or a clamp or mounting that has worked loose.
A smell matters too. A strong sulphur or rotten-egg smell inside the car points to a leak, usually at the manifold or the pipe itself. Trust that one — the dangerous part of exhaust gas has no smell at all, so if you can smell anything, gas is getting somewhere it should not be.
Every petrol car built since January 1993 has a catalytic converter. Inside is a ceramic honeycomb riddled with pores under a millimetre across, coated in platinum, palladium and rhodium. Exhaust heat drives a reaction across that surface that turns carbon monoxide and unburnt fuel into carbon dioxide and water, and strips out the gases that cause smog.
They fail in two very different ways. Too much unburnt fuel reaching the exhaust makes the catalyst run extremely hot and ruins the fine coating, so it quietly stops converting. Or the opposite: rapid cooling, like driving through deep water, can shatter the honeycomb and physically block the pipe, which you notice immediately because the engine loses its breath.
Here is the part worth knowing before anyone quotes you. The lambda sensor measures oxygen in the exhaust and reports it to the ECU, which trims the fuel mixture accordingly. A failing sensor or a confused ECU makes the mixture wrong, and a wrong mixture is what cooks the converter. So a "failed cat" is frequently a symptom, and fitting a new one to a car with the original fault still on it is an expensive way to buy a few months.
Euro 5 made diesel particulate filters effectively standard from 2009, fully in force by 2011, so almost any diesel of that age or newer has one. Inside is a silicon-carbide honeycomb that traps soot rather than letting it out as black smoke. It has a finite capacity, so it has to clear itself, and that process is called regeneration.
It happens two ways. Passive regeneration is the good one: sustained speed and revs get the exhaust hot enough to burn the soot off as a by-product of normal driving. Most manufacturers reckon on a steady run above 40mph for half an hour every few hundred miles. Motorway drivers do this without ever thinking about it. Active regeneration is the fallback — the ECU injects extra fuel purely to raise the exhaust temperature and burn the soot off deliberately.
Which is why this is a town-driving problem. A car that only ever does short, cold, stop-start trips never gets hot enough to regenerate passively, and interrupted active regens leave the soot where it is. If the DPF light comes on and stays on for days, turns red, or starts flashing, the regens are failing and it needs looking at — ignoring it typically shows up as lost power, worse economy, cooling fans running constantly, and stop-start giving up.
Left long enough it stops being a cleaning job and becomes a replacement. Filters generally last well past 100,000 miles and often to 150,000, but a car that only does short trips can struggle to reach 70,000. Removing one is illegal and is checked at the MOT.
The MOT checks the exhaust on two counts: the emissions coming out of it, and the system itself being complete, secure and free of serious leaks. A blow that you have got used to hearing is a straightforward fail.
If your test is coming up and something underneath sounds louder than it used to, it is worth a look beforehand rather than finding out on the day.
Repairs done right, and explained.
Repairs · common questions
Free health check, air con & four-wheel laser alignment.
Bookable online alongside MOTs and servicing. All prices include VAT.
What each of these actually involves
Why they matter, when they're worth doing, and what we're looking at.
Free Health Check
A quick visual once-over of the things that catch people out, free of charge. It takes about ten minutes, because nothing is stripped down and nothing is dismantled — we look at the car, put it up on the lift for a scan underneath, and tell you honestly what we can see. If everything is fine, we say so and you go on your way.
- Your lights, front and back
- Wiper blades, which are cheap to put right and easy to forget
- Tyres looked over for tread and condition
- Brake wear, as far as a visual check can show
- A quick scan underneath on the lift
It is genuinely free, but it has to be booked in. That is not a catch — it is so there is a slot and a lift free when you arrive, rather than you standing about waiting.
Air Conditioning
Air conditioning loses refrigerant slowly and continuously — it is a sealed system but not a perfect one, so it fades rather than fails, and most people put up with it getting gradually less cold without noticing when it started. It is also not just a summer system: it is the quickest way to demist a windscreen in winter, so it earns its keep all year.
- A re-gas replaces lost refrigerant and gets the cooling back
- Damp sitting in the system lets bacteria build up, which is where the smell from the vents comes from when you first switch it on
- A blocked pollen filter chokes the airflow and makes the whole system work harder, so it is worth checking at the same time
- If it has stopped cooling suddenly rather than gradually, that is usually a leak or a component fault — a re-gas alone will just leak out again, so it is worth finding out first
Run it for a few minutes every couple of weeks, winter included. It keeps the seals lubricated and stops the slow leak turning into a repair.
Four-Wheel Laser Alignment
Alignment is the angle your wheels sit at relative to each other and the road, and we measure all four with a laser rig rather than just the front pair. Glasgow potholes and kerbs knock it out, usually without any drama at the time. Once it is out, your tyres are being dragged slightly sideways every mile you drive, which scrubs the tread off one edge and costs you fuel while it does it.
- The car pulls to one side on a flat, straight road
- The steering wheel sits off-centre when you are going straight
- Tread wearing faster on one edge of a tyre than the other
- Vibration or a wheel that feels unsettled at speed
Worth a check after any decent pothole or kerb strike, and worth knowing before you spend money on tyres — there is no sense putting a new set on a car that will wear them at an angle.