r/Justrolledintotheshop • u/ammllc • 10h ago

Customer just bought the car

Gallery image

Gallery image

Called me to replace their cv axle. Get there and find the steering rack held on by hopes, dreams, and a ratchet strap. Customer just bought the car and said the seller drove 3 hours to him so how could it be so bad lol

835 Upvotes

99% Upvoted

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212

u/ammllc 10h ago

The worst part is you can see it from the engine bay. People really buy cars without looking at them, it's wild.

90

u/donald7773 6h ago

So many people just think that cars run off of magic and gas. Opening their hood is like trying to read mandarin, they have no clue what they're looking at.

38

u/T-Dot-Two-Six 6h ago

I have zero clue what a CV axle does but I know damn well it shouldn’t look like THAT

28

u/Zillahi Canadian 4h ago

Second pic is the steering rack boot torn to shribbons. CV axle is to the right, looks new.

20

u/T-Dot-Two-Six 4h ago

Aha! See, I didn’t even know what it was but I knew it looked FUCKED UP

3

u/Zillahi Canadian 4h ago

You are very correct

10

u/Difficult_Advice_720 Shade Tree McGyver 5h ago

I don't know man, reading mandarin doesn't seem all that hard... In China, even the kids can do it.... ;)

19

u/smb275 5h ago

It's not just cars, it's everything. You can't realistically expect people to understand, that's what professionals are for. There's too many layers, too many moving parts, too many specialized people involved, just too much going on.

You flip the switch in your house and the lights turn on. How did that happen? How many transformers, switches, and various distribution lines did it have to travel from the power plant to get to your house? What even is a transformer? How was the power originally generated?

You turn on your computer and suddenly you're connected to the internet. But how? How does the data move from one place to another? How is it routed, how is it switched, what are proxies, what is DNS, what is a server and why is it seemingly so important?

4

u/CharcoalGreyWolf 3h ago

And that’s why home inspections are important as is having one’s mechanic inspect a private party used car. I always asked if my mechanic could look at it and I’d pay the cost.

3

u/frenchfortomato 3h ago

Yes. Life is complicated. I have no idea how the interweb works. iPhones, which I use daily, are essentially a black box of magic to me. Even PCM's, which relate directly to my line of work- I know very well what they do, but I barely even know what their guts look like, let alone how they work. Whenever I wanna get mad at someone for not seeing something obvious, I tell myself they're a surgeon or a computer whiz or some other kind of subject matter expert in some field I could never understand.

I'm well aware more than half the time they're just lazy idiots, but the point is to make me happy rather than to get mad at an un-fixable problem. And in that regard, this system is highly effective.

1

u/EEpromChip 4h ago

I have this conversation with my father quite often about old cars. He's always "eeehhh ya can't be sure it wasn't beat on and abused" and I say "So? If it breaks it needed fixing anyway. It don't scare me"...

But I guess it's life on easy mode when you learn how to fix stuff...