If your abs sensors come out easily then it's pretty straightforward but there is a lot of things that can fight you which you won't know about until you start. Rusted bolts, rusted hubs and welded in ball joints and abs sensors. I had the lot! The £70? Ball joint removal do dah is a must as well as hammers, grinders, plus gas, map torch, bigger hammers.
My joints were good but the rubbers had rotted too. If you search my posts for 'Duchess is in the garage' or summut, you'll have an idea of my struggles and maybe have a laugh at me too :vb-weee: .
 
I was quoted 400 quid to do the tracking and lower ball joint replacement. Hence that emotional Monday when I was trying to do it. That was just for one ball joint replacement. See if you can source parts yourself and just pay them for labour.

A few places will use parts owner sourced, but not many, they have to guarantee the work, they won't do that on unknown sourced parts
 
When we bled the brakes last week, simply stuck it in high and crawled underneath, no faffing. Same with the abs sensor brilliant access.
 
A few places will use parts owner sourced, but not many, they have to guarantee the work, they won't do that on unknown sourced parts
My local garage & I have that arrangement. If either of my cars ('87 RRC & '98 BMW) are serviced I supply the engine oil leaving them to supply filters etc.
When it comes to maintenance/repairs I source the components & accept the responsibility for them; saves the guy a stack of time trawling around factors for obsolete parts (you want a what? 'nah never 'eard of it) & I just pay for the labour.

Both parties have been happy with this arrangement for years. Very occasionally I've lost out on labour if I've had to return a faulty component, but by & large I'm financially ahead in this silly car ownership game :cool:
 
Just had my usual (very good) garage on the blower about the works proposed for the car next week.
>£1,000 :( Apparently it needs new upper & lower ball-joints and track rod. Apparently the parts are non-returnable and special order because of the age of the car and its 6-hours of labour to replace. I really don't know what to do. That's a lot of money.
The car drives fine. All I can see on the last service advisory that kicked this off is that there are split dust-covers on the rear drag link and that the O/S/F and N/S/F upper & lower ball joint dust covers are split.

They'll be charging that because they know just about every bolt will be rusted and seized and probably need grinding off and replacing.

It isn't a bad job but we broke one of the cheap (relatively) splitters off eBay when MrGorsky did his. Had to buy another but still cheaper than the Land Rover tool. I think Brian said the one for some van (Mercedes?) was more robust and worked well.
 

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