A mechanical workshop in Cairns, working on every make

Cars here are not doing the job the schedule assumes

Manufacturer service intervals are written against a temperate reference climate. A car in Cairns is doing something else entirely: sustained ambient heat, salt in the air within a few kilometres of most of the city, dust off cane and unsealed access, short trips that never bring an engine to temperature, long descents off the Kuranda and Gillies ranges, and towing on a great many of them. Open the back of the owner's handbook and there is a second schedule headed severe service. Most cars here meet three or four of its conditions permanently.

That changes method, not just frequency. Brake fluid absorbs moisture out of the air and boils lower once it has, which is a real problem on a range and a non-issue on a flat commute, so we test it rather than assume. Salt corrodes fasteners from underneath, so a job that runs two hours on an inland car can take most of a day on one from the beachfront. Where that applies, we price it in at the start instead of ringing you halfway through with bad news. Getting those judgements right is most of what local knowledge is actually worth.

What we will not do

We will not put parts on a car to find out whether they fix it. A fault code names a circuit, not a component, and swapping the part the code mentions is a coin toss the customer pays for either way. The circuit gets tested first, and if a fault is intermittent and will not present while we have the car, you get told that rather than sold a part so it looks like something happened.

We will not claim credentials we do not hold. In Queensland a safety certificate can only be issued by an Approved Inspection Station, and nowhere on this site do we say we are one. When that changes, it will say so with a number attached. The same goes for reviews, ratings and years in business: there are none published here, because publishing them before they exist is just lying early.

And we will not quietly do work you did not approve. If a job turns out bigger once it is apart, the car stops and the phone rings. Sometimes the answer we give is that a repair costs more than the car is worth, or that something is worn but has a year left in it. Saying so costs us the job, and it is the entire reason anyone comes back.

How a job actually runs

You ring and describe what the car is doing and when it does it, because a noise that only turns up cold is a different fault from one that only turns up hot. You get a time and an honest estimate of how long the car will be with us, including whether a part has to come up from Brisbane, which is the thing most likely to add a day up here. We look before we quote, since a price given over the phone for a fault nobody has seen is a guess. You approve the work, and anything found after that point is a second phone call rather than a bigger invoice. Then you get the car back with an account of what was replaced, what is wearing but can wait, and what we looked at and left alone.

Where we work

Cars come to us from the southern corridor at Edmonton, Bentley Park, Gordonvale and Woree, from Earlville, Manunda and the Portsmith industrial precinct, and from Redlynch, Smithfield and Trinity Beach in the north. Each of those places wears a car out differently, and the suburb pages set out what your part of Cairns does to a vehicle in more detail than a coverage list would.