Mark-ups...

I've come across some mark-ups that rival even high-end hifi cables for their ridiculousness...

1) I've just bought a Hope XC rear hub. From a bike shop a replacement set of bearings is £15-£16. However, Hope were smart enough to use a standard bearing cartridge, the 6001 2RS. These can be obtained for around £5 for 10 (the hub takes 4 at once).

2) Cables! Of a different sort though... My car has developed a slight misfire from cold (well, mainly from damp) and I think the HT leads are the problem. The ignition set up on the Galant is rather odd, in that there are 2 coils, one sat atop cylinder 4 and one on cylinder 2. Then there are very short HT leads from cyl 4 to cyl 1 and from cyl 2 to cyl 3. Total between the two leads is no more than 14" or so. However, Mitsubishi part prices take the cake.... £84.64!!!!

 

I think urine extraction is a better title for this thread

 

Gotta be a far cheaper alternative to those surely?

Get Nordost or The Missing Link or someone to make you some special 'uns for the same price as Mitsubishi want - gold plated, de-oxit treated, cryogenically frozen HT leads....gotta be worth 20bhp at least

Halfords do HT leads far cheaper than that...and the markup on some Halfords stuff is pretty darn high at times (if you purchase car parts using a trade card they're much lower though...a bloke bought an inline fuel filter from the Halfords store I work part-time in the other day, and I printed off the trade sales invoice for it - retail is about £3.50, but with the card the trade price was 87p or something daft!).

 

Haha I mate bought pair of brand new HT leads for £10 for his Fiesta and a garage replaced the coil and HT leads on my dads car for £60 inc labour.

It always is a joke though, it is the classic DSG £14.99 USB cable scenario

 

I have no idea how much HT leads cost nowadays but £84.64 sound very cheap for a pair of any branded audiophools interconnects that people are willing to change hand around here. So I think Mitsubishi should just put up their price even more.

 

YOu should try a set of 'HT' leads for an Alfa 155/156 Twin spark they are dual coils as NO leads are used they sit ontop of the plugs (at £186 per set of 8, 2 per cylinder) and the coils are £58ish + vat. or a set of rear pads for a 166, £116+vat

 

mark up is more commonly known in business as profit - most businesses need to make one.

i think the car business works on a model of selling cars at low margins and generating revenue during the service phase. if the service rates/part costs were lower then the price of cars would have to be correspondingly higher.

you could always shop around

 

Some BMW parts are ludicrously expensive. The engine in my M3 doesn't have HT leads - there's a coil per cylinder...£60 per coil x6 = £360 a set (allthough they rarely need replacing).

Special NGK spark plugs are £20 each - x6 = £120 for a set of plugs

The M3 engine takes special Castrol TWS 10W60 oil...generally only available from BMW and costs £18 a litre so it's £100 of oil every time you have to change it.

Just had to get a new central locking plunger/actuator...£60. It's just a small plastic box with a solenoid switch FFS!

OTOH, set of front pads is just £60, and rear pads just £40 which compares well with those for the Alfa 166 that WM mentioned above

Michael.

 

Sony accessories for just about anything - all proprietary and all bloody expensive.

Ditto the camera tripod adaptor plate that my Nikon F301 needed - £30odd for a bit of metal. I only paid £180 for the WHOLE camera (1991 prices, obviously!).

How about Linn Ekos bearings - IIRC it's around £600 to replace them, yet they're IDENTICAL to the ones in the Rega RB300 (according to a certain member of staff in a certain hifi shop). Yep, you can buy around 3 RB300s for the Linn replacement cost.

 

Isaac - how are you finding the Hope hub?

I used to have a Hope hub, and it was well clicky ! - clickkkkkk

 

I thought the coils on my Skoda were expensive, but at £28 each they're positively giving them away!
And as for car stuff being overpriced, I always go to an independent motor factors - I find they can be 30% cheaper than Halfords! (spose someone's got to pay for all those TV ads..)

 

Chris - it's not got to me yet, will report later... It's part of a general upgrade (lighter rear wheel, going from 8 to 9 speed block and change from rim to disc).

It's all very well saying "shop around", and that's fine if you drive a ford or VAG or whatever. However, very few places have any mitsubishi parts, and you never quite know if they'll be the right ones (and it's no good giving them the engine code because there's around 3 billion variations on the 4G63 engine... Turbocharged, N/A, DOHC, SOHC, etc, etc). An example of the wrong things being printed is halford's book for bulbs. That lists the stop/tail light for the Galant as a 382. 382 is a single-filament bayonet bulb, whereas the stop/tail on the galant is a dual-filament wedge (7443 in fact, which halfords don't stock). Glaring errors like that make me have no faith in them... And I already looked in their leads book and the lead they suggest is..... "-"

Mike - My dad's 740iL attracts lower per hour service charges from a main dealer than my galant does (£48ph for BMW, £55-£60ph for mitsu) as well as some lower part prices (discs and pads are cheaper on the bmw). However, I've got some fairly funky fluids in the galant now (Amsoil ATF - £10/litre, Amsoil Engine oil, £9/litre. Gave up on the dealer recommended oils when I drained 4.5 litres of tar out of the engine after 7000 miles (formerly shell helix)).

 

Isaac - I only take my M3 to a local independent (BMW specialist) now and they charge about €30ph. They also do a better job than the dealers. The last service I had cost...€2364 :cry: of which only €400 was labour. The big cost was €1200 for a new clutch and dual-mass flywheel.

Michael.

 

Yeah... there's other parts that are expensive... dad's just had new coils, new cat, new inlet manifold gasket and new ECU... very little change from £2k...

 

Jesus, in the last 18 months my dad has had the rear shocks replaced, the front wishbone and coil spring (drivers side), two full services, a new cat, lamda sensor, couple of replacement valves, new ignition coil, ht leads, seat welding, rear taigate lock fan switch, complete new exhaust and front discs all for less than £1000.

When we first got the Punto it was still under warranty so we had to take it for a dealers for service, they charged £250 just for replacing the rear shocks. This was at 20,000 miles!

 

Lawks!
I just replaced the clutch on my Guzzi, it cost £150 including input and output oil seals, and I thought that was expensive!
Took me 2 days to do it though - there's always a "special tool" needed, that's only useful for one job and costs £50. Luckily I had a pneumatic impact driver to bodge it with...

 

The dual-mass flywheel is the expensive part...€700. The clutch is 'only' €300. You may be wondering what can go wrong with a flywheel...and so did I! The clue is in the words dual-mass. For improved smoothness and less strain on the drivetrain and clutch the flywheel is actually two discs of metal joined by bits of rubber (in essence). The rubber interface allows a bit of flex which takes up the worst of any torque 'shock'. Those rubber bits wear and, eventually, they can break leaving you with and engine that's totally disconnected from your gearbox and drivetrain!

Dual-mass flywheels apparently pretty standard in many cars these days (all 6 cyl BMWs since the early 90s for example).

Michael.

 

Weren't you going to get a 320d Touring?

 

The teeth snapped on my grandads flywheel causing it to not start properly. It was a Lada though :

 

Yes. I still am....when I can find someone to buy my M3 :cry: . It's a very, very difficult car to sell in Portugal. For a start it's a small country (10 million) so the market is small. You have to be reasonably wealthy to afford to run an M3 (maintenance, petrol, insurance are all high) and reasonably wealthy people in Portugal by new cars, not 10yr old ones. It really has to be a wealthy enhusiast. There are probably less than 10 people in the entire country who might buy it.

I've had it for sale for nearly a year and have had 3 people look at the car who all decided not to buy it for one reason or another. I must admit I started off with a rather optimistic asking price but it's now very fair at €18000. The insurance value is €17500 and the Eurotax/Glass's guide price about the same. Even in Germany you wouldn't pay much less. I'd take €15000 if someone offered that.

I looked into trading it in at various dealers but they just laugh when they see my car as they know how hard it is to sell. The best offer I had from a dealer was €7500 which is just a joke.

Michael.