Nightmare Weekend.

[craigsup]

Was meant to have a nice weekend away with my OH in Birmingham's Christmas market on the Saturday and a gig on the Sunday. I had booked into a DIY garage to do a simple service on my BMW - change filters, oil change and change brake pads.

Bear in mind I'm a complete novice - never worked on a car before - so it's been a major learning curve.

I had all the things delivered in time for Thursday - so I headed to the garage and began working on the filters. After about 2.5 hours of struggling to get the Air Filter out, I finally managed. However I ran out of time to do any other stuff so I went back on Friday to 'finish off'.

Just my luck - the brake pads that had been sent to me via ECP were the wrong ones. So after 30 mins of searching through the mechanic's parts catalogue we had to take a trip to Halfords. They ordered the 'right' part for delivery on Saturday morning, 9:30am.

The garage owner is a great bloke who was understanding, and let me keep my car on his ramp overnight - so I went down to Halfords at 9:30 waiting for the pads. Phone call after phone call, they eventually arrived at 10:50am. Turns out Halfords gets them delivered from ECP...

Got a taxi back to the garage and tried to fit them. Wrong fking size again - the two caliper bolts didn't quite fit past the surrounding metal of the pad. A phone call to ECP and got told Halfords had ordered the wrong year...So ECP delivered the correct set within an hour.

Got the pads on, filled up the oil and off I went, back to my house where my OH was furious that I was 3 hours late setting off to Birmingham

About 20 mins into the journey and the car started violently vibrating from underneath our feet - first I thought it was the brake pads wearing in, but it was too bad for that. Pulled in and spoke to the mechanic - drove a bit further just to check the pads.

Eventually had to call the AA (which I'd joined 4 days ago - thank god). He found the panel on the underneath of the car had come loose, and was flapping around in the wind. He also said there was oil on the underneath of my car and the dipstick showed minimum...So he said he's going to recover the car.

So, back to the garage we went, but it was closed (5pm on a saturday). So had to get a train to Birmingham and now I'm going to have to check the damage after work today - my mechanic had a quick look and said there is no oil leak - so I had obviously not put as much in as I thought. Hopefully I can just re-attach the plastic panel and it's sorted.

To top it all off, when I got back from Birmingham last night, I dropped a plate full of food all over my carpet...stty weekend.

[craigsup]

noell35 said:

conclusive proof that DIY stands for Don't Involve Yourself.

Depends how you look at it - I've had a stty weekend, but I've also learnt a lot about the general maintenance of my car. Whether or not I use it in the future, at least I now know how long tasks should take and therefore cannot get scammed by garages.

[craigsup]

Diablos-666 said:

Good effort for trying but next time maybe do this sort of stuff when you have a totally free weekend. That way it doesn't matter how long you take and you're not rushing.

Thank you - yeah I'm certainly going to do it when I've got more time. I now know the Germans like to put many obstacles in the way of things!

hornetrider said:

As above - best not to try things the first time when you have some place to be soon after, things can and do go wrong! However kudos to you for trying it and learning about the car - it will stand you in good stead for the future. You're now a little further along the learning curve.

Cheers

liner33 said:

Next time , take a brake pad to the parts supplier , there is often a pic in their catalogue

Yeah, I now know which ones I need (if I need to change this cars pads again, which I probably won't) but for future cars, I'll go to the counter and do that!

[craigsup]

Aphex said:

All this story was missing was the rain and the dark

Sounds like lessons have been learnt so onwards and upwards from here

Oh it was pissing it down and dark (around 5pm) while I was pulled in on the A61. I got drenched while checking my wheels / callipers.

[craigsup]

Doofus said:

With all due respect (and sympathy), I'm not sure that you have...

How so?

[craigsup]

Conscript said:

Depends on the car of course, but the difference between the min and max readings isn't always very much. Sometimes you can add a surprisingly small amount of oil and find the level returns to normal on the dipstick.

You're right - I added a very small amount yesterday and it went from just above min -> just below max.

As for people saying not to work on my own car without knowledge - how does anyone learn anything? You have to do things in order to learn. I guess some people don't care about learning though, they just want everything done for them.

[craigsup]

eltax91 said:

I built mine up by firstly enrolling in evening classes at the local college, that was immensely useful as it was a practical based course.

Then I had a few mishaps like yours trying to fix my own car.

Then I saved up enough money to buy a weekend toy and I do all manor of jobs on it, I've done everything except a major drivetrain component swap. I now only do the basics on the daily and am very weary of the kind of jobs that might soon out into hours and leave it on stilts.

It helps having the weekender to fail back on mind, assuming it's working!!

Sadly I don't have the time to do a course, nor the space to have a 2nd car!
Maybe in the future once I move house I can get a cheap 2nd car and have a play.

[craigsup]

Sump said:

Most people have a natural knack for things like DIY. But when it is taking 2 and half hours to change an air filter, you really have to question whether you have that knack for it or not.

So you're telling me that you've never done a task which has taken you significantly longer than you anticipated? You're an arrogant person if not. I had never looked beyond an oil cap prior to this weekend, so of course it's going to take me a long time to do things. Plus, my BMW needed many things removing in order to access the Air filter and then there were some tricky bolts to undo.

As the above poster stated, I am a software engineer. I can strip and build / alter a PC in half an hour, I can write a program to automate any process, I've coded a working sat nav. Just because you can do something straight away, does not mean a complete novice with no experience can do the same; stop being so short sighted.

[craigsup]

swisstoni said:

OP - People are just having a laugh, and have almost certainly made major cock ups of their own especially when starting out. There's some good advice here too.

Yeah, I know - I just feel some may be pushing it a bit too far. Anywhoo I'll definitely be taking the advise of ensuring I won't be needing the car in the near future when planning to do any work on it. Also making sure I have the correct part before I start will also come in handy!

[craigsup]

essayer said:

http://www.e90post.com/forums/showthread.php?t=279...

Fair bit of disassembly (and reassembly) required!

Thank you for providing the link so people can see the steps required!
I originally thought it was easy (based on other models) but I had to choose the most difficult model of car!

[craigsup]

Sump said:

That is pretty mental. Sorry matey.

Did you even have the e sockets? I certainly wasn't carrying Esockets when I started out diying

Haha no worries.
I was at a DIY garage, the guy that runs it uses it as a working garage so I can use anything he has (which is a lot of stuff!)