Rob88

DaveB, if you feel like you're learning again may I offer 1 suggeston.

The prodrive track in kennilworth do a 2 hour session, 1 hour on track, 1 hour on skidpan - for a few hundred quid.
After having my geo done I went there and learned a bit more about handling the car at speed in a safe environment.

I'm a big fan of Centre Gravity.
Perhaps it is a bit more expensive then some other places, but I certainly felt I got value for money.


As for siezed bolts.
WIM is very lucky to have only seen 2 siezed bolts in all it's time working on many S2000s. I've only worked on 1 S2000 and I've already seen 7 of them.

DaveB

I'm glad some of you are finding benefit from my feedback.

Here are a few responses/comments to your replies:

Condition of Car before job - Completely original MY00 UK spec car with 70k on the clock. Following health check Chris's conclusions were that mine was the worst S2000 he'd seen in that all front and rear bushes were seized, the 2 front compliance bushes had started de-laminating and only the front toes could be adjusted which was a slight blessing I guess. So in essence my car has needed the "full monty" in terms of bush replacement.

Is circa £200 too much? - I guess that's really a matter of personal preference. The facts are that I'd already spent £100 on an alledged re-alignment a few years ago with a garage that came recommended by some work colleagues - and by the way I even provided the Honda Bulletin of alignment settings so there was no chance of a mistake there. It was clear from Chris's assessment that it was unlikely any adjustments had been made on the premise that my set-up was so bad and it wouldn't get that bad in 3 years as well as there was little evidence of any bolts being worked by an impact driver/spanner etc. Reading this forum clearly highlighted a very real issue with seized bushes which is not I understand such a common issue on many other cars so your average local laser alignment shop wouldn't want to entertain giving the bolts to much of a hard time as the resultant effect to them would be the need for new wishbones as the S2000 is also rare in that replacement OEM bushes are not available. Your local garage probably wouldn't be aware of the availability of replacement aftermarket bushes nor would they probably want to entertain the mammoth job to replace them as they are in the business of get cars in and out in an hour or 2. Which leads me to look for someone who's a suspension specialist and one that comes recommended by S2000 owners. Recognising Center Gravity and Wheels In Motion as such specialists I contacted the nearer of the 2 who happened to be in retrospect the more experienced as he started his business with a very healthy turnover of S2000 bush replacement jobs (now over 500 cars if I recall from my chats with Chris). I think in this case, you do truly get what you pay for but appreciate that the condition of your car has some influence on value for money i.e. the worse your car the more you will need the likes of CG or WIM to do the job. But without the health check you may never know.

Costs - I'm not going to tell you exactly how much as component prices and labour rates change but if yours is as bad as mine look to spend circa £1300. Compare that with Honda's solution which is to replace the every wishbone at a total cost of over £2000 as I think I read in a thread on here. As the Americans say "You do the math.."

Hope that helps. I'm only too happy to give back to s2ki members what I have learnt and experienced as I have learnt so much on s2ki.com myself in the last 5 years.

eSeM

£2k would just about buy you the wishbones, control arms, bolts and drop links.

You could expect to pay another £2k in labour from a Honda dealer to fix it.

CG and WIM are very good value when you take this into consideration.

However, if you have the tools, you can DIY the whole job for a few hundred £.

punchdrunk

This comment here tells its own story. WIM would have been cheaper for sure because he doesn't start from the premise that the bushes need replacing to sort the alignment out.

You're happy and you've had new bushes, but £1500 on alignment is ridiculous IMO.

Just my opinionated view so don't take it personally.

lovegroova

It's not £1,500 on alignment, though. Most of that is repairs...

Chris will replace bushes if they need doing. Given the worries and dealer costs mentioned above, a good number of people have chosen to get some or all of the bushes replaced with Powerflex or similar. Chris offers it as an option, but does not start out with the premise of replacing bushes willy-nilly. To say otherwise is a bit disingenuous in my opinionated view.

In fact, a lot of bush replacement has been driven by comment on this forum. It's similar for things like braces, coilovers, stereos and other add-ons/repairs. Once one person does something to their car and tells the forum how good it is, a lot of folk follow.

I have one seized bolt, but both Chris and Tony have been able to work with/around it in order to adjust the geometry correctly, and neither has charged me excessively for any work they've done.

m1bjr

I keep hoping that if I read enough of your posts, one day you will make sense to me.

So far it's not happened...

Rob88

I think you misread the previous posts.
It's NOT £1500 on an alignment.

If you go into CG and have 0 siezed bolts and have good bushes then an alignment will cost you under £200. (or there abouts)
Which I guess is about the same as WIM or others give or take.

If you have siezed bolts and or damaged bushes then the cost will go up accordingly.

I think it can take over an hour to take a stuck bolt, cut it out, grease it an replace it. I don’t remember the exact hourly rate – but each stuck bolt will cost you around £100.
From what I understand replacing bushes is a long and time consuming job too.

If I, or the OP, were to go back to Crist with our cars then we would just pay the basic geo cost of £200.

I’ve never been to WIM, and this isn’t meant as an insult to them, but had the OP taken their car down there I wonder what the final bill would have looked like with so many stuck bolts and buggered bushes.

Gaspode

Tony's hourly rates are on a par with Chris.

The big difference is that Chris spends around an hour with you afterwards taking you through all the handling characteristic changes.

I like Tony, but I prefer having the extra hour so I fully understand how my car will now behave.


Both are very capable and recommend customers to each other due to geography.



And Chris has geo'd many cars with seized bolts too.


If you have a lot of seized bolts - Garage R Had ( or maybe still has ) an offer on for a complete suspension rebuild, bush replacement etc for a fixed price.