Spanners in the Works by Mark Williams

There used to be a suspicion prevalent amongst grumbling punters that motorcars and motorbicycles were manufactured to go wrong. In other words mechanical weakness and their concomitant faults were deliberately designed in, so that within a fairly predictable time-span, ideally just outside the warranty period, owners would need to have their vehicles repaired. ..and suitably stiffed for the full repair costs. Furthermore, wily if not cynically irresponsible dealers would enhance the prospect of this just-out-of-warranty income by deliberately fudging their PDIs or first services - work paid for by the manufacturer in any case - so that reliability was compromised. With the advent of two, and even gawd help us, three year mechanical warranties - certainly amongst car manufacturers desperate to buy market share - these practices all became less tenable... Assuming, of course, that my outrageous premise has any credibility at all. It may of course be coincidental that manufacturing tolerances and the design integrity which they permit simply improved exponentially over the past 10-15 years, but the fact of the matter is that unless you're horribly unlucky, anything but the routine replacement of service parts is unlikely to trouble the new car or bike buyer for the first several years of ownership. Which is perhaps why many dealers, pushed to the brink of extinction by wafer-thin margins, finally fall over the edge because they simply haven't got any workshop income to rely on. Sure, the trade has been beset by scandals concerning the poor quality of service departments in recent years, and it's instructive to note that some of the worst culprits as far as shoddy spannerwork is concerned are the mega-marts that have recently gone down the crapper. (Publisher's note: By which we believe Mr Williams to mean that they have ceased trading...)

And my suspicion is that they'll return in one shape or form because the importers need the volume and will turn a blind eye to the poor after sales service that inevitably follows. But depressing though this prospect is, being Mr. Egocentric from the Planet Selfish it's not what concerns me personally. No, what currently irks me is the increasing problem of getting someone - anyone - to properly fix a broken bike once it's well out of warranty. It started when my M-reg GPz500S needed a new fork seal just before its MoT. As I'd learnt from bitter experience rebuilding my even older XT350, you really need a factory tool to dismantle most modern(ish) fork legs, and another one to ram home the seal. And although I spent an inordinate amount of time cobbling them together from workshop scrap, it was not an exercise I wished or had time to repeat for the Kwacker. And as I've moaned before, official dealers for anything (except Honda and KTM, oddly enough), involve at least an hour's travel from my mud-girt home. When I got on the dog to my nearest Kawasaki dealers, one said he had a waiting time of almost three weeks before he could do the work and the other rather impudently excoriated the good name of Kawasaki, before unsurprisingly admitting that they were no longer agents for the marque, although they still had the tools. ..but could do no better than twelve working days anyway. In the event, I took the fork leg out myself and by dint of pulling the old 'I'm a journo' schtick (you'd think dealers would laugh at this by now), was I able to get one of a dying breed of independent workshops who had the tools and could do the job three day's later... but even that involved a 70 minute drive each way. And don't think I wouldn't have cause to whine if I lived in a Glittering Metropolis, because sometimes I do. Or rather my Suzuki AN125 does... but only just. My girlfriend returned to her North London flat just after my fork seal fiasco to find that vandals had ripped out my scoot's ignition barrel and all but sawn through the lock securing it to a mighty oak, (they might've had more luck chopping down the tree, but I guess the neighbours would've noticed).

Again, special tools are required to replace the ignition gubbins and I figured if I was going to have to pay to have the thing carted off to a dealer I might as well get the recently surfaced steering wobble seen to as well (we used to call 'em tank slappers in the days when we had tanks... or indeed, slappers). And I have a horrid fear that it's the headstock bearings. Now these days Suzuki's website lists only four official dealers in the whole of London - a city of seven million people, mind - and only one of 'em (the one furthest away, natch), could take on the work earlier than two week's hence. Just by way of comparison, my nearest VW dealer quoted a mere four day wait to service the girlfriend's Golf... and they'd provide a courtesy car. The moral of this tale is not that the major importers could coerce their dealers into providing faster servicing (although they should), nor that any of the poor sods seduced out of their cars and onto scooters under the threat of congestion charging deserve better treatment (which they do)... No, it's that there must be loads of potential for canny, independent companies to make a bundle repairing bikes and scooters without having to bother with the unsavoury business of selling 'em. Sure, there are already a number of rapid repair outfits in London catering primarily to the despatch trade, and although I personally savour their oily floors, shelves heaving with used parts and genially jaundiced philosphy, they may not be everyone's cup of tea. And in any case, these back street heroes can't be found on the internet. Of course non-franchised service outfits might well have trouble recruiting from the dwindling pool of qualified mechanics, or indeed securing all the vital service tools required... But if necessary I can tell 'em how to bodge together a fork slider lock-nut holder from a pair of BSF nuts welded onto a length of builders studding and a seal driver from a length of scaffolding. Just the sort of admirable ingenuity that once enabled rogue dealers to fill their workshops with post-warranty breakdowns.

The above article is from the September 2003 issue of Motorcycle Trader
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