You get what you pay for

So today I decide to leave work for lunch, mostly because there are times I just don't want to be there.  After getting some iced tea there I am, sitting in my now street legal Durango, and some old dude decides to bang on my passenger side window.

My first thought was aggressive panhandler and that I should just kick his scummy ass for touching my truck.  I was kind of right...

It turns out he wanted to know if he could fix the dents on the passenger side of the truck, for the princely sum of...ready?  Eighty-five dollars.  I told him no, you cannot fix those for $85, and I just got done spending all my money making the damn truck pass inspection.

The rest of the conversation went like this:

Him: No I can fix those right here for $85.

Me: No, I don't have $85.

Him: Well how about $65.

Me: No, I don't have money and you cant fix those properly for $65.

Him: Well I can follow you to wherever you are going and...

Me: If you follow me anywhere I am calling the cops.

Him: Well how much money do you have?

Me in irate-and-fucking-done-with-this mode:

NONE OF YOUR GODDAMN FUCKING BUSINESS HOW MUCH MONEY I HAVE, NOW FUCK OFF!

Is it possible to have a dent removed for $85? Well, possibly.  I cannot imagine it being a dent much larger than a half inch wide or so.  A dent that is, well, just a dent without creasing the metalwork maybe can be done by one of those "paintless dent removal" outfits for that price. Don't get me wrong I am not trying to knock one of these outfits, but I have admittedly never used them because I usually could care less about minor dents.

My dents are about fist sized, and in the case of the right rear door the metal is creased.  Frankly if anything I would just replace the door and call it a day.  Same with the fender.

I tell you this story to tell you another story, and that is that you most certainly do get what you pay for in this world.  Do you want a decent paint job? Decent paint jobs can be had at Macco sometimes for as low as $299.00.  Think you will get rust repair with that? Think again...their ads all say you will not.  Same with bodywork.

The same can be applied to tools of any trade.  In this case, hand tools that you pay a little bit for are going to last longer, have lifetime or forever warranties, and probably are not going to break in the middle of the job you are trying to do.  This is why I prefer to buy my tools from NAPA (Irwin, napa professional, lisle) Sears (craftsman, lisle) Home Depot (husky), Snap on and Matco.  When you go cheap, a lot of times there is no warranty, no guarantee, and in the case of Harbor Freight (from personal experience) good luck getting replacement parts.

The problem with things like a "decent" paint job, "decent" hand tools, and "decent" almost any other service is that your vision of "decent" will greatly differ from the roadside paint and body man's "decent".  Or to put it another way: To properly repair the one dent in the rear quarter of my truck, some dent pulling is going to be involved.  This may remove most but not all of the dent.  What is left will have to be covered in body filler, sanded, primered, sanded again, primered again, top coated with matching paint and then clear coated. The sanding alone is going to take time because you have to use more than one grit (roughness) of sandpaper.  My truck might look silver but it is actually called by Chrysler "bright platinum" and there is a bit of metal flake in the paint. (google that)  Do you think the roadside guy has that in his car?

The bottom line is this: quality costs money in many cases. Probably in most cases.  If you want a proper repair, you should expect to have to pay for it.  I am not saying to go to the most expensive repair shop out there but I am saying that while having your brakes replaced for $25 per axle might sound like a good deal, no way in hell is that job going to be done right by someone with any sort of experience, or a shop for that matter.  It's been my experience that getting work done on the cheap is a lot like rushing through a job just to say you got the job done, in the sense that down the line you are going to end up spending more money to get it done right.

My brother once commented on my facebook page that if you have the money to do something twice then you have the money to have it done right the first time.  Think about that for a minute.  Let's say you go and have your brake pads replaced, but since you decided to "save" money, you bought the cheapest pads out there.  What happens when you have to replace them in a year?  Presuming that you are not stomping on the brakes every time you stop, you now have to pay someone to replace the pads, you are without your car for a time, and you are shelling out money that you could allocate for something else.

Now let's say you actually spent money on those pads. Again not stomping on the brakes at every stop, you could get two or three years out of those pads, possibly more.  There are those that will say that you end up spending the same amount of money with buying more expensive pads and not replacing them as often.  I offer that you are leaving out the time it takes to replace them, the money for the labor to replace them (which is the same no matter what brand of part you decide to purchase) and the down time on the vehicle.

The bottom line here is that you get what you pay for...and tell roadside hucksters to fuck off when they accost you.