Chapter 12- What Dai Found That the Screen Could Not

Dai drove ninety miles to that auction yard on the Thursday before the sale, which cost Ffion two hundred and sixty pounds including his road time, and which is the best money spent anywhere in this book.

He spent about seventy minutes on the car. She followed him with the notebook.

This chapter exists because a reader who has come through eleven chapters of readings could reasonably conclude that the adapter is the method. It is not. Roughly half of what makes a used car expensive has no sensor attached to it, and the audit that had just told Ffion this car was worth bidding on had nothing to say about any of it.

What He Found

Two rear tyres at the legal limit, which is a pass at an MOT and is not a thing you want to inherit.

Rear brake discs corroded at the edges and pads well down, which on a car that has done sixty eight thousand miles mostly on the front brakes is entirely normal and is still a bill.

A cambelt with no record of replacement anywhere in the folder, on an engine and mileage where the manufacturer's interval had been reached. Dai was blunt about this one and made her write it as its own line rather than folding it into general servicing.

Two perished suspension bushes at the rear.

And a full service due, because the car had been sitting on a yard for six weeks.

Seventy minutes with a torch, on a car that had just passed a clean audit.

Fourteen hundred and twenty pounds of work, on a car whose entire electronic record was good, found by a man with a light and forty years of knowing where to put his hand.

The cambelt is the item Ffion would have missed entirely and it is the one that would have ended the car. On that engine a belt failure is not a repair, it is a replacement engine, and the only reason anybody knew was that Dai looked at the age of the car, the mileage, the folder and the belt itself and drew a conclusion from all four.

Where a British Car Rots

He spent twenty of the seventy minutes underneath, and in this country that is the correct allocation.

Three places worth a torch on any car that has seen ten British winters.

The front subframe and its mounting points. The sills and the jacking points, which is where a tester looks and where corrosion becomes a failure rather than an advisory. And the rear beam and spring seats, which on a great many cars is where the structural corrosion arrives first and which nobody ever looks at.

Dai's instruction, which any buyer can follow without any training, is to look for two things rather than for rust itself. Look for underseal that is newer than the car, in one area only, because fresh underseal in one small place is somebody covering something. And look for weld that is not factory, because a repaired section is not necessarily a problem and an undisclosed repaired section tells you about the seller.

He found neither on that car. Surface corrosion consistent with its age, nothing structural, and one advisory on the published record from two years earlier that had never got worse.

The Rule About Order

Ffion paid Dai three times across the eleven weeks. Two inspections at a hundred and ten pounds each and the auction trip at two hundred and sixty.

Four hundred and eighty pounds, against eight cars looked at.

She did not pay for an inspection on six of them, because the audit had ended those six in ten minutes each with a tool that costs nothing to run. The locked Golf, the cleared Focus, the ash loaded Astra, the BMW with the counters, the Qashqai and the Peugeot were all resolved before anybody needed to be paid.

Inspecting all eight would have been close to nine hundred pounds. Inspecting none of them would have meant buying a car with a cambelt overdue on a yard in Wolverhampton and finding out about it on the A11.

Dai's own summary, delivered in the yard with his hands black, is the sentence that governs both of these books. He said the scanner tells you which cars are worth paying me to look at.

What He Would Not Do

Two things Dai declined, and both are worth knowing before hiring anybody.

He would not put a value on the car. Ffion asked twice. His position is that a mechanic who prices cars ends up selling cars, and that he was not going to be the man who told a customer to spend seven thousand pounds.

What he would do is price work, which is a different thing, and he gave her figures for everything on his list and told her which of them he thought would come in under.

And he would not touch the fault memory on a car his customer did not own, for any reason, including the innocent one of clearing a code to see whether it returned. He said that the moment he did that, every finding he had made that day became arguable and so did his name.

That is the same rule written on the inside cover of Ffion's notebook, arrived at independently by a man who has never read it.

One further thing he said, which she has repeated since. He told her that most of the pre purchase inspections he does are on cars that were never going to be bought, and that the customer who arrives having already eliminated six candidates for nothing is the customer he can actually help.

What Ffion Learned

• Roughly half of what makes a used car expensive has no sensor attached to it.

• Tyres at the legal limit are a pass and are still a bill you are inheriting.

• A cambelt with no record of replacement, at or past its interval, is the item that ends an engine rather than costing a repair.

• Front subframe mounts, sills and jacking points, and the rear beam and spring seats are where a British car rots.

• Look for underseal newer than the car in one small area, and for weld that is not factory.

• Scan first because it is free and eliminates most candidates. Inspect second, on survivors only, because it costs real money.

• The scanner tells you which cars are worth paying somebody to look at.

This curated preview is provided for personal reading. Copyright remains with Nobo Astoria.