MikeP84

Hello all and thank you for reading. My fuel lines up near my gas tank are old, rusted, and in some spots rubber tube where they have broken. Has anyone gone threw and replaced them? Wondering if there are pre bent sets you can buy or if you had to hand bend them and how intensive the whole job was. I would really like to drop the rear dif out again this winter to clean, fix a few things and address some rust. With that out I may pull rear bumper to replace it so I would be pretty close to dropping tank. Thank you for any advice and pictures if you have em!

I should also mention my car is an 84!

ZWILDZR1

I had to replace them on my 96 LT1 Coupe. What a fiasco that was. The lines had rubbed together at a bend at the rear by the back of the car. I figured a simple fix so I took it to the local Chevrolet dealer. They told me I needed a new gas tank as it was rusted through. So they quoted me like over $7000.00 . In a few spots it had just a tiny bit of surface rust. Besides the tank could be rusted through it has a bladder it wouldn't leak. I bought both lines from another dealer. They are pre bent and were very long. I used my conversion van to pick them up. The lines are installed at the factory early on before all the suspension front and rear are in. So I found it much easier to cut the lines at the back near the tank and then put in solid unions to complete the process. So I had new lines and no one would have seen the nice junctions I put in anyway.

1993C4LT1

Any pics of that zwild? OP, it is a pain to replace them. I never did it, but feared I might have had to. Gas tank and rear bumper have to fully come off.

ZWILDZR1

I got rid of the 96 but wish I had taken some pics of the nice junctions I installed. The lines had a bit of surface rust here and there. They just rubbed together where they curve to go up to the tank. Created a leak at the bend. The surface rust is why I decided to go ahead and replace both the return and send lines. It wasn't fun and there was no way I was going to do all the extra work needed to install the lines on a car with close to 130K. Especially when no one would be able to see what I did without either putting it on a lift or crawling under and using a flash light.

1993C4LT1

I'm confused. The fuel lines are rubber. We must be thinking of different fuel lines.

aklim

I see a win-win situation. Either you pay me the $7000 and I make absurd money and do the job or you get out of my sight and I don't have to do the job. I win either way.

ZWILDZR1

No it's sad is what it is. This is why many people distrust car dealers and they have the right to be mad and angry. Not only is it dishonest it's criminal also. Not soon after I bought my 96 LT1 coupe in 2001 the water pump started leaking. I consulted a friend who was familiar with C4 Corvettes. He told me that if the water pump had been leaking for sometime it probably needed an opti spark as you are right there you should just do it. At this time I was working lots of hours so I had no time to do it myself and I took it to the dealer just up from work and told them I wanted the water pump and opti replaced. So they did. Fast forward to around 2004. The car would start running strangely. It would loose power and buck, like it was running out of time. So after trying to chase down what was going on I finally took it to a small Corvette only specialty shop. They determined that it was the distributor. It was worn out.

So how can that be. It was replaced along with the water pump at 78K and now the car had just about 110K on the odometer. That's because it still had the original in it. So that Chevrolet dealer installed a new water pump and didn't do the opti-spark. But they charged me for it. I'm sure they did this many times. They are no longer in business. But you can imagine how many customers they cheated and robbed along the way. My second job was working doing , tires, front ends, suspension , and brakes. We had plenty of work and never sold someone something they didn't need or say we did a job when we hadn't actually done the work. To us reputation was everything along with work done in a timely manner and done correctly. It's sad that many places resort to this type of nothing less than criminal activity.

aklim

And if you think this sort of practice is by car dealerships only, think again. This sort of behavior is done by human beings. I have personally seen someone refuse to buy a trans filter because it cost too much money and he was selling the car. He bought enough fluid to make it look fresh for the buyer though. People will be people and will do dishonest things.

With people making a habit of leaving both their credit card at the shop and assuming it will be done right, many, rightfully so, will get ripped. You didn't do your due diligence and the guy thought he could make a few bucks on you. I always recommend getting to know the work habits of the particular tech through small jobs and let it build up. You drop off the car and it goes to whomever has a free moment. I know who I want working on my car through built up confidence. If I had to drop it off, I will tell the service writer "ONLY JOHN works on it. I find out someone else does, I don't pay.".

Let me give you another story of when I had surgery breaking my fibula and tearing tendons. After surgery, I was in pain. I asked for pain meds. The nurse gave me some plausible sounding reason why I can only have it in 6 hours more. I told her I don't understand medical stuff but my wife, being in the medical field, does. Could she give her access to my file and she can explain it to me. Less than 20 mins later, I got pain meds. Wife suspected that it was close enough to shift change and she did the narc count and didn't want to redo it so she palmed me off to the next nurse. She wasn't a dealership mechanic but why? Because it made more sense for HER to do it. IOW it was more convenient, less trouble, etc for her to blow off my request than to do it. When she knew she'd be busted when my wife came, it changed the equation and it was more expedient for me to get pain meds. Weird, huh?

ZWILDZR1

More like that nurse was just plain lazy. Why should she go through all that trouble when she was about to get off. Let the next nurse do it. About getting ripped off by the dealer I knew about stuff like this because I had worked in the industry and was even told by friends who worked at large dealerships things they had done. Steps they skipped when doing warranty work. Because they were expected to eat it and not get paid. This in fact pushed one tech over the limit and he came in with a gun and shot and killed two people and then himself. People I knew were dead. He was told to do redo a job that the head mechanic redid once. So he refused and this led to him being terminated. So he came in with a handgun a 9mm I believe and he shot the mechanic who was over him , Bob my friend and the service manager before turning the gun on himself.
http://articles.baltimoresun.com/199...chevrolet-reed

PatternDayTrader

Interesting story. I'm surprised that sort of thing doesn't happen more often. Flat rate pay causes a lot of problems, but its the only way to avoid minimum wage and overtime laws, so dealers stick with it.
Flat rate also leads to "upselling" repairs that are not needed, and non disclosure of repairs that are needed, but don't pay well.
I don't know what happened in the above situation, but something tells me the service manager had it coming.

ZWILDZR1

You just don't know what else is going on in somebodies life. This is what happened in this case. He had bought the firearm legally. Had some trouble with a neighbor and discharged the weapon and covered up a bullet hole in a closet at his apartment. But underlying this was having trouble with his girlfriend and maybe loosing visiting rights with his child. So when confronted with the loss of his job he snapped. It wasn't the first time that he had to redo something Bob had done previously. But Bob had seniority and so as very frequently it gets passed down to the lowly tech at the bottom. Bob did rear ends and transmissions that's what his position was and he was very good at it. But this is what happens many times at dealerships and with warranty work. The techs are asked to eat the labor.

Bob had a wife and daughter and the service manager had a wife and kids as did the shooter. But you just don't know what frame of mind people are in and it seems to be worse these days. Sorry to the original poster about hi jacking his thread and trouble with his fuel lines.

aklim

Dealership has an additional issue. The warranty work. If that guy was going to skip steps, I believe he would skip steps regardless. IMO, you and I agreed to a certain amount. Don't come carping that you are not making enough and now you need to steal office stationery to make up some of the money. You wanted the stability of a dealership and warranty work comes with that deal. Take the deal or reject the deal or find a better deal elsewhere. I chose to work with Autozone. There are advantages over Parts House X. There are also disadvantages of working with Autozone. It is part of the package. If I feel that I get a better deal OVERALL at Parts House X, there is where I should apply. It is that simple. Sorry, I was told I had some fascination with McDonalds so Autozone it is.

No, I disagree. He was insubordinate and that led to his termination. I have bad days at work. Besides the fact that the people that irritate me are on the other end of the world, literally, and I would need an ICBM to get them, I can't blame the work. I can quit the job if I don't think it works out for me. What I can't have is ONLY the good parts of a job with none of the sucky stuff. If the workplace goes too far, I can get another job somewhere else. I have had sucky jobs and quit them with 2 weeks notice. A couple were fun initially then someone got promoted and became a jerk. OK. I'll go somewhere else then. You don't like something, appeal it up the "chain of command" and then court. In his case, I'm not sure why he shot the guy who trained him since I couldn't see what he had to do with his firing caused by his insubordination.

aklim

Back up there. He had some beef with a neighbor and discharging a weapon? His next problem came at work and he discharged the weapon again? Anyone see a pattern? What if it wasn't at work but some guy who cut him off, aka "road rage"? Then blame the road? His problem is simple. He didn't solve the problem by discharging the gun on himself to begin with.

ZWILDZR1

I'm with you totally. If it had been me I would have sucked it up and did what they told me. If I really didn't like it that badly I would have packed my tools up and left. I did this. I had a kid rear end me and total my Trans Am. I wasn't suppose to be working but I came in and did a few front end alignments to helps out. I left him the use of my top tool box. When I came back in one day I found he had broken the lock out of my bottom box. That and a few other things he did really rubbed me the wrong way. So I returned with my buddies Blazer and packed up my tools and went down the road. A year and a half later he was out of business. Bob and David didn't deserve to be killed period.

PatternDayTrader

Speaking to the bolded print.
Usually repeated comebacks and the most difficult jobs end up assigned to the most competent tech. Obviously I cant speak to this particular situation, but in a general way, the worst position in a dealers shop is to be the top tech. You get the most difficult jobs, because you are the only one who can get them right. This means every time a problem car starts to be a problem for management, you get the job assignment. Ultimately, what this means is the most talented people leave the dealerships, and only the average, or less than average techs stay. Its not hard to see why this causes so much trouble for the customer.

ZWILDZR1

I think in this case it had a lot to do with the fact that Bob had already done a couple cars on warranty work and said as the department head to give it to his subordinate. Mr. Reed had several chances to change his mind and do it. But in the end he chose to say no and was terminated. Really had nothing to do with who was the best.

aklim

I think this is more of a case where he felt slighted for whatever reason and like with his neighbor, he did something stupid. At least he had the decency to off himself and save us a lot of issues further down the line. If it wasn't this case, he'd have lit up like a christmas tree on something else that pissed him off. I agree your two friends didn't deserve to die too but that guy was unstable from the get go.

PatternDayTrader

Yeah im sure he was a loser, or he would have done the work, made everyone happy, then told them all to go **** themselves as he walked out the door forever.

I'm speaking more to why you don't normally get high quality work done at a dealer. Its because the system itself makes it too difficult for the best people to stay, so they don't. This is why you were quoted 7k for the fuel line issue.

MikeP84

Im sorry to hear about your friend and service manager. I also don't like dealerships much. Honestly it's mostly because I dont trust them to do the job right without damaging something else, but i also enjoy learning and doing it myself. Lastly the overcharge a crap ton for work. I understand why labor rates are as high as they are 20$ and hour for mechanic and 30$~ for the shop but still. They mark up any parts you buy from them. I took my car down to the dealership to have them check out why my slave cylinders where going bad and id lose clutch pressure. Had been fighting the issue for 5 years and was pretty sick of it. They drove my car to park it, then drove it back into shop next day when I came to pick it up. They told me it needed a new master, slave and line. Well not **** I already knew that, I wanted them to find out WHY I had gone threw a slave cylinder each year for the past 5 years. Non the less I paid them the 50$ and left laughing at their 500$ quote.

aklim

I haven't had too many breakages that they didn't cover. OTHO, I have had more breakages that I had to cover because I did it myself. See below for explaination.

If I brew biodiesel, it is about $0.60 a gallon. Why is it so cheap? Because I am doing it in my shed, using my own truck and time to get the waste oil. I'm not paying for taxes or anything else, really. It looks cheap because it is artificial. So let me ask you this. I want you to set up a shop, pay all the misc stuff and what not to fix my car. How much would YOU charge? If I work at McDonnalds, I charge $10 per hour for my labor. It costs me a little bit of fuel, wear and tear on my car. If I want a profit for my labor, how can I fairly tell them that they cannot make a profit for their work?

When the parts go bad, you want them to stand behind it. When they stock the parts, it takes up real estate and you don't have to wait and that costs money. When they have to get a parts person, it costs money. This is no different from going to Autozone and asking why they charge more than Amazon. CONVENIENCE.

THAT right there is your basic problem. You dropped off the car and let them do what they want. You need to do your own legwork if you want this to work. I don't run my company without supervising the employees. The better they are, the less I watch over them. I find the mechanic I like and ask for him by name. I already know how he works because I invested the time to investigate him on simple jobs and work him up to bigger and bigger jobs. When my MB tech was new, I didn't trust him a whit. I was always watching him till I saw he had good habits. Today, he is doing an R&R on a motor with no supervision because I already did the legwork in the past.