It seams that fiat specialist seam to charge the earth for major jobs like cam belts, clutches and so on.
I have had a cheapest quote of £450 for the clutch and £400 for the cam belt and most of that is labor. So are these such hard jobs that they take so much time? Are they possible for someone like my self who is an engineer but not a mechanic to do?
One place wanted 2k just labor!

Most of the cambelt cost is the belts and tensioners. The clutch change is quite a big job so you cant expect it to cost £25.

Things dont need to be difficult to take a long time.

They probably did not want to do the job, quite a usual tactic rather than refusing outright.

they phoned me asking me if i wanted them to do it lol
i can understand the cambelt and i would always think of getting a garage to do that but if i had a decent garage with proper tools could i do the clutch do you think?
just seams like a lot of money for what it is. and they know its hard to do so they just bump the price up because they know the tricks on how to do it

I don't think many of the well-known Coupe specialists whom many on here take their cars to have high labour rates - thinking back aren't they about £40/hour or thereabouts? Seems pretty reasonable to me.

cheapest i have found is 300 labour on the clutch and £200 on the cambelt

agree with that, I pay £45 an hour, very reasonable if you consider Ford/Fiat/VW etc hourly rates. A friend of mine works at Merc in slough, there hourly rate is in the mid one hundreds, and its always going up !!

Maybe I'm missing something, but if you dont know how to do it then how can you judge that they're taking longer than they should to do it.

Maybe if you offer to tell them some skyline stories they'll do it for free.

Thing is you do take these cars to the known specialist to ensure the job is done correctly and professionally without major comebacks.
You pay a premium for the service,i only personally dealt with motormech and the service was great,friendly and honest.Which if you value you will pay.

I paid a cheap price for a clutch and ended back at a specialist for replacement a week later.

hey i think thats a bit out of order to be fair!
as a moderator i would expect more from you!

ok i don't know how its done but i still think that is a high labour charge if they can do it all in well under a day!

in comparison, my brother has a 306 1.9 diesel, new clutch fitted on that inc labour, almost £300, which, when you compare the differences in car, show that £450, or there abouts, is a very good price.

£400 for a cambelt if it is the full kit, water pump, aux belts and all tensioners is very cheap. The kit alone is over £200.

Depends also how much you value your time. I decided to replace the Manifold on my Coupe and it took me at least 4 hours to do so I can see why Powerfiat/Italia justify charging what they do for the job, in fact they are probably not charging enough especially on Air Con cars as it makes it a fair bit more fiddly.

John

For life example of a cheap belt change.

The coupe I currently have had a dodgy cam sensor which when investigated by powerfiat was found to have been caused by a damaged inlet wheel (there is a lip that runs round the inlet wheel that the sensor detects a gap in) that had been caused by someone using a screwdriver or similar when changing the cambelt rather than the cambelt tool.

Non specialist would probably have changed the sensor and not noticed the damage leading to another change of sensor 6-12 months down the line.

Buy cheap pay twice.

Note to moderators - keep up the abuse

ok i think the cambelt has to be done but powerfiat then :-)
moderators don't keep up the abuse as its un called for!

I agree wholehartedly with coupedummy, when I bought my car it'd had a cheap clutch replacement, because it hadn't been fitted correctly it only lasted 300 miles, and drove like a dog. Had a new one fitted by a specialist and it's such a good job, it's just a completely different car to drive now.

And, £400 for a clutch (done properly) is not bad at all considering the work involved... my Celica GT4 cost me the best part of £1000!!

Depends if you want your car to drive okay, or drive like it should... that's my opinion anyway

Not an entirely valid comparison as my previous car was mid-engined, but cost around £500 for the cambelt, and similar for a new clutch.

I know it's more expensive for 20V Coupe's, but I just got my cambelt done for £350 - costs aren't actually that high in comparison to everyday shopping trollies...

Plus, you can't buy a car with a five cylinder engine and turbo crammed under the bonnet and expect it to be a doddle to work on / bargain basement labour charges.

If that's what you're after, buy a cheap Vauxhall. Mechanics rave about them, simple as anything to work on. You pays your money..

yeah i know but really its not that cheap and not compared to other high powered cars either.
i do understand these are harder to work on so i will have to just pay up i think :-(

In which case if you think that a couple of hundred extra pounds every 3 years is a major issue then buy the other (less attractive) similar high powered car. The cars are very cheap anyway.

And its worth getting everything done in one go as well, clutch / cam sensor / belts as you are bound to get cost reduction when its all done at the same time.

Becoming an owner of a car like a coupe is also a timing issue. Mine had recently had the cam belt done but not the clutch. I had the clutch done 2 years ago and still probably have another couple of years left in it. Rad went last year and the timing belts are due now so that’s next years expense years expense.

If I had bought the car when all that lot had to be done at one I would be feeling the pinch!

So about £400 a year on major bits plus £100 for service items if you do them yourself.

Given that I have new cooler pipes, rad, plenty of clutch left and belts soon done I should get a couple of years at lower cost.

It is not a cheap car to run, and the cheaper ones can take quite a bill to get up to a level of maintenance that doesn’t give you big bills.

As for servicing costs and large jobs such as the clutch and cam belt, I would say the likes of Poweritalia and Motormech are very reasonable, both jobs are time consuming and once tooling is taken into account, a false economy for the DIYer.

its a pain really and i have thought about selling it and just buying another skyline or dear i say a rover coupe turbo as i have had two of these and the parts are have the price and everything can be worked on easy peasy to

Example of cheap labour....


After a couple of months of having my car, the clutch was starting to slip, and was getting worse really fast. My mates garage simply didn't have the time to fit me in, so I began looking about. I picked up a Valeo clutch kit for £116 inc vat and was happy with that. I then found a garage called "Master Clutch" who said they could fit it for me for £150. I was made up with that, so it was booked in for the Friday morning. I got the car there bright and shiny, 9 o'clock and handed over my keys. I was told the car would be ready for 3. I turned up at 4 and the car hadn't moved from where I'd parked it. They then pulled it in and started taking it apart, I got picked up by my mate at half past. I popped down on Saturday afternoon at 2 o'clock to see how they were getting on, and the place was closed. Sunday I went down at 10 o'clock... Closed. I called them Monday morning, and they said they still hadn't even took it apart. They called me at 12 o'clock to tell me it needed a new clutch... I told them that was the reason they had it, and the new clutch was in the car where the mechanic left it. At half 5 I turned up to pick it up after just making the post office to get tax for it. I was told they had it on a 4 mile road test, and everything was ok with it... To quote the mechanic... "It's f*ckin' rapid isn't it!"

I got in it and drove off, but it didn't feel right. It had no power at all. So it got nursed the 3 miles home and parked up. I took it to my mates garage and asked them to look over it. They hadn't tightened any of the boost hoses and the vacuum hose was dangling.

The words... "You get what you pay for" bit me right in the arse.

How much is it for a cambelt change on a Skyline? Surely it's not gonna be under £300odd at the very least.

£100 difference is considerably less than you'll spend on depreciation - something that's already levelled out on most Coupes.

I think they're fairly average to run - had cheaper, had more expensive. Toyota, for instance - a non-premium brand that charges a fortune for panels and parts. You wouldn't buy a Ferrari and expect to get the cam belt done for £150.

Just gotta face it, some things cost money. That's probably a part of the reason these cars are currently so cheap to buy.

i know the more i look at it, its not that expensive really but i like to do work to keep cost down but it doubt i can with the coop :-(
for example a clutch for a skyline uprated to hold 500+ bhp £450 fitted.
uprated clutch to hold 350 bhp fitted on coop £800
and the skyline is a pig to change the clutch to!

i understand about paying for cheap shit garages and thats the same for any car but everything seams to be really hard or expensive to do on this car and yes its a 5 cylinder but not the only car with a tight engine bay

You need to look at the bigger picture.

With a Skyline, they're known more so for tuning. Hence parts are made in bulk, and there will be more gullible people willing to part with the readies for say a clutch that will hold 4643436453535bhp and cost them £200. When in truth, the quality of these are terrible, and you'd probably be better making one out of paper machete. But the mindset of the majority of these people would be.....

"Yerrrrrs! My Skyline's got that much power, I destroyed a clutch in half a mile!!! It wasn't too bad on the price though, so I'll get the one rated to twenty million horse power in stead..."

With the Coupé, tuning parts are more of a specialist market, and compared to our Jap Crap friends, they're not as in demand. You say that a 300bhp clutch fitted on a Coupé would cost £800? I'd say that's a bit far fetched. My mate's EVO has got a triple plate carbon Exedy clutch I think (I might be wrong), and that costs the best part of £1600 for the clutch alone, not fitted. Again, the famous saying that goes with most things... You get what you pay for.

not at all the 500 bhp clutch is a r32 gtr exeedy clutch which last and drives better than the standard nissan clutch. same as a helix!
when you have a 4wd car yes clutches need more bit for launches but a triple plate carbon clutch is extreame and not a normal clutch!
its £500 for a helix organic and £300 to fit so yes £800

Parts can be more expensive for the Coupe. I bought a RPM Organic for my old S14a, the clutch was £326, so around £130 cheaper than a helix organic for the Coupe. As Coupecraig says tuning jap cars is more common world-wide, esp. Japan & the US, so economies of scale means model specific uprated parts are cheaper.

This is getting off topic, no more about jap clutches please

So a mildly tuned Coupé, running a nice 330bhp and 300ft/lbs. You're talking say £700-£800 for a Helix clutch fitted.

On comparison, we'd need to use a mildly tuned Skyline R33 GT-R. So lets go with a "genuine" 450bhp and 425ft/lbs.

Helix is possibly the best clutch for the Coupé, so we'll use the best possible for the R33, we'll go with Exedy. What would that one cost you? Do you think it would be cheaper, including labour? I doubt it very much.

peanuthead - I notice you are in Maidenhead. You should try Rosewood garage in Burnham, by boyf took his TT in there for a new cambelt etc and they did a good job and very good price. I was chatting to the guy who owns it and it turns out that as they are literally round the corner from the Fiat Garage in Slough, they do alot of work for them.

The really stupid thing is, that if you took your Fiat into this particular dealer, it would go to Rosewood anyway, as apparently Slough Fiat dont have (girl bit coming up, apologies) the lift up thing that makes it easy to get to everything on the car - they only have a pit there it seems.

So you pay full whack for dealer and it all gets done at an independent anyway!