how hard could it be?

I've been having this problem with the Civic for the past few months. Everytime I take a left turn, there's a clunk noise from the front. Since it was a public holiday for me yesterday, I decided to get a few things done. Firstly, I scheduled for the aircond units in the house to be cleaned and chemically washed. One thing, my aircond in the room was starting to form ice on the coils. Everytime I switch it off in the morning, the ice would thaw, causing it to drip onto the floor.

Woke up early yesterday to send Yen to her training course in Mont Kiara. After that I rushed back to wait for the aircond servicing people. He turned up alone, which made me think that this was going to take a long time. Sure enough, he started at 1000hrs and finished at 1430hrs. I was really hungry and tired, had to help him out a little since his worker did not turn up for work.

So took a quick lunch and headed down to Peter's at SS3. Comes highly recommended by Jason. Since Kam Seng has moved up north, I really didn't have a regular mechanic anymore. I had a bad experience with Peter once when I bought my Mazda. It took him forever to change the fuel tank due to manpower shortage. Yesterday, I got there around 1520hrs and his worker diagnosed the problem. Turns out the CVJ (Constant Velocity Joint) has given way, and worst case scenario is that it would have worn out the drive shaft. Luckily for me, it was still in it's early stage and I would just have to replace the CVJ. They told me, when they get the spare part, it'll be an hour's job.

So the CVJ was delivered by the dispatch boy from the spare part shop. The worker finished his lunch and started to remove the drive shaft from my Civic. Since there were only 2 models, the 1.7 litre and 2.0 litre ES, how hard could it be?

Once the drive shaft was removed, they found that the CVJ did not fit. Great, here I am expecting the job to be done by 1630hrs so that I could pick Yen up. After that, Peter said that they would need to reorder the part, the shop sent a different one. So again I waited, the dispatch boy was no where to be seen. He finally came over and took the unit back. He returned much later, around 1730hrs. Again, it didn't fit. That was when I told my wife that she needs to take the cab home. The Civic was in no condition to move, they've drained all the transmission fluid and the whole right drive shaft was removed.

To top it all off, I was having the worst headache from the lack of sleep and heat. I can't remember the last time I had to stay in a workshop for so long. I used to go to a shop in SS2, but due to the inconsistent charges, I gave up after the 3rd visit. So I've switched back to Peter and yet again, it seems that I have the waiting problem here again.

It was bad enough with Kam Seng, that he'd take his sweet time to fix things up. But at least you'll have a good time there and he'd give you funny stories to cheer you up. If you couldn't wait, he'd point you to the right tools and you do it yourself, which was what I did last time. Learnt quite a lot of things from him, at least he'd teach you if you really wanted to learn.

Looks like finding a good regular workshop is quite difficult.