Getting a decent specialist for your Mk2 gti..is it geographical?

I live in North West Wales, although I am English and was born in Birmingham! I have owned Mk2 Gti's for five years now and in all the time I have lived in this part of the world, I have really struggled to find a specialist garage that can look after my car in the way I expect!

I recently had a full engine rebuild and used a local garage on Anglesey (actually a BMW specialist, but with a young mechanic there who loves Mk2 gti's). They did an okay job with the rebuild, but ever since I have had a long list of issues with the car (see my rebuild thread).

Before using this garage I had my car serviced by an ex VW mechanic in his late 50's, but he also made several mistakes and treated any modification with deep suspicion!! He thought that the Eibach ARB's he fitted for me would ruin the gti chassis?? (numpty)

I am now in the position where the garage who did the rebuild have severely f****d me off with their incompetence and lack of attention to detail (Example: Giving my car back to me after the rebuild with the dizzy not tightened up!)

I realise that I am currently living in one of the poorest, least populated and least advanced (in that the area is still stuck in the 1970's) parts of the UK, but it shouldn't be this difficult to find a caring, decent VW garage??

Before anyone mentions AVW in Caernarfon, I wouldn't take myself or my car within 20 miles of that dump (the garage and the town).

In other parts of the UK there are decent VW specialists such as TSR, Stealth, Midland VW and Awesome.

My question is do I need to move or travel hundreds of miles to get decent, competent work carried out on my car??

Seriously though, do other members on here have issues with garages in remote parts of the UK..is the problem geographical?

Expecting perfection is unrealistic, but expecting a decent service from a garage that knows these 20 yrs + old cars inside out is not!! I am a mature owner, and fairly intelligent..how come these local garage specialists don't understand what I am asking for?

I look at some of the cars at the shows and in Golf+ or PVW magazines and it makes me realise that there must be really good specialists out there? The cars are so good they must get expert treatment?

Any thoughts??,

Cheers Alpenweiss2

 

with all the advise you can get on here on how to fix a mk2...just buy the spanners and fix it yourself

theyre so old most garages forget whats what on em anyway

 

The specialist i use is generally ok, sometimes he is a bit lazy but his costs i cant complain at and he takes all of the abuse i throw at him if he gets it wrong

 

with the old golfs getting "old" the people who used to be good with them are either dead or have forgotten all the tricks..

i would say wilsons in rhuddlan - but tbh i know the guys are old skool but i dont know how much recent experience they will have with the old golfs - the best bet is to use this forum, ignore the halfwits and pick out the good info, most will have endured exactly what you have going on.

i actually found that in any vehicle maintenance, not just VW related it is hard to find a decent mechanic these days - nowadays i only let tyre fitters work on my car and they are supervised due to the new BBS RM wheels ha

 

I'd go wherever I had to to get the quality I wanted tbh.

I'm constantly amazed by the amount of "mechanics" I ring when something is beyond my skill set who have no bloody idea what a mk2 Golf is (as if they didnt make enough of the bloody things!) - Even more worrying is when you speak to some of the VW techs at the stealerships.

 

the trouble is most of the workshop staff in a dealership would have never of worked on a mk2, think its pretty rare to find someone who has worked in the same dealership for 20+years, plus they will never actually see mk2s in a main dealer now so its hard to diagnose something you are unfamilier with

 

A very high percentage of these cars are worked on by either the owners or one of the main VAG tuning specialists, due to fact these places need customers with money they dont go opening them in remote areas with little money, so yea it geographical.

But even the specialists dont have the sun shinning out of there ass, Dubbusiness just straight up ripped me off, TSR took far too long to diagnose a simple fault so It cost me 2hrs of RR time and both times iv been to stealth I didnt leave impressed but they are still very fair there. The simple answer is you need to work on your own car, its really not hard, you adjusted your cam vernier the other day with just a simple paragraph explaining it, if you can do that you'll be amazed what else you can do with the right tools and help guides, and all the money saved on garage labour buys you alot of tools!

 

I've used Wilsons in the past when my MK2 was on the road...

 

Where in North Wales are you out of interest? I was born in Aberystwyth and grew up in Tywyn (as in the one on the West coast)!

Crumbs, I'd never dream of trying to find any kind of specialist over that way.

 

DIY. It's the only way. Except for wheel alignment, and balancing tyres, and other components, unless you have the correct kit, you should do-it-yourself.

Don't let anyone, who does not love your car, touch it!

 

Exactly as above. For 6 years the only cars i have owned and drove have been mk1 and mk2 golfs and i have done everything myself excluding, tyres, tracking and mots. I have never left my cars at a garage, ive always been with it.

Break out the spanners.

 

Is there not a VAG specialist just after Menai? Seems to ring a bell... On the same trading estate as the Landrover guy?

 

Another problem is that people expect mechanics to be petrolheads who`ll share their enthusiasm, but the reality is they are just doing a job they ended up in and having worked day in day out on peoples` cars are thoroughly sick of the sight of them.

The upshot is they`ll do a half-a*sed job to get you out the door, or make some excuse not to do the job (too difficult, no experience, etc), and generally don`t understand modifications.

A specialist is more likely to be an enthusiast too, so that`s why 9/10 you`ll get what you want from them.

Of course there`s not exactly a saturation of them so sometimes you have to travel a bit to use them.

I`m lucky having Awesome nearby, but it`s still a 30 mile round trip, and being popular means they`re more often than not very busy, so that`s why I do all work myself nowadays. More satisfying that way too...

 

move over here to Essex mate, there is lots of specialists to chose from, im lucky i can almost wee on AMD where i live and they more than know their onions!

 

Hi Raider! Can you enlighten me? Where do you mean exactly?

Cheers Alpenweiss2

 

Not 100% sure... Did a job for the Land Rover guy a couple of years back and he was on a small industrial estate not far after the bridge. I seem to recall a VAG specialist on the same estate but my memory is sketchy as to where 100% it actually was..

 

...pretty soul destroying when self confessed apparently good reputation VAG servicing and Rolling road tuning experts manage to mark up tdc on the flywheel about 6 degrees ATDC!........then continue to fit a Vernier pulley and cambelt and tensioner and end up winding the vernier 5 degrees retarded to manage 131bhp on the dyno-dynamics on a 10,000mls TSR 2.0 8v with big valve head and 272 cam that should be producing 145+bhp

after research and reading on here i took the plunge yesterday and wound up TDC on the correct dimple on flywheel to find 1 and 4 lobes on the cam were nowhere near equal overlap so with vernier set to 0 i advanced the toothed belt 1 tooth and checked this against ot marker on cam cover.....lobes now pretty much bang on equal
belt retensioned and all back together in a little over an hour i then advanced the vernier to 3 dedgrees advanced after suggestions on here again .........test drive ensued and

the moral here is if you love your golf then learn to fix and tune yourself as i have

good luck fella

 

im thinking pentraeth... as the only 4x4 place that i know of is/was Holdsworth 4x4/ l&r landrover, however a vw specialist in that area does not ring a bell - i can recommend the garage on that estate as some girl i used to work with, her partner works there - but again not specialising

raider, was the estate on the right hand side 3/4 of the way up a big hill?

 

there is nothing in my area (uxbridge)... id have to travel to find anything decent.. nearest place is the phirm i think and thats like 60 miles away!