Sigh, after putting it off for a couple of days already and having had such an enjoyable evening out with the guys on Tuesday night, yesterday morning was the perfect opportunity for me to tighten my loincloth and head off to my old steadfast Hi-Q branch that I’ve been using for years now, situated in Strand road, Bellville (Thanks for letting me sleep over the night Ryan).
I had already inspected my tyres myself and despite trying to lie to myself that I could get away with only purchasing 1 or 2 new rubbers, in my heart of hearts I knew that I had been putting tyre rotation off for far too long already and thus was not at all surprised when the guy at the fitment centre pointed out to me that apart from the brand new spare, all three existing tyres should in fact be replaced.
Now up to this point I’ve always driven with Goodyear GT2 tyres on the Jetta, but as Ryan pointed out to me, my days of racing around like a pizza delivering maniac are long since behind me and as such I asked the guy for a couple of new options from which to choose, with me finally settling on four Pirellis that I liked the sound of. As always the bloke did his best to try and sweet talk me into putting wider, more expensive tyres on the car, but like I told him, ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’, meaning I stayed with the same dimension and rated tyres as what I’ve always used over these past couple of years.
And of course, as it par for the course these days, the minute the guys started looking at the car, faults were being pointed out left, right and centre, the most serious of these being the worn strut mounts on my shocks which needed to be replaced sooner than later, adding yet another expense to what was already destined to be a rather pricey morning out in Bellville. The other blow was the discovery that my brand new spare that I was currently riding around on did in fact have a slow puncture like I suspected – courtesy of a nice iron nail jutting out on the shoulder of the tyre as pointed out to me by one of the fitment assistants. Wonderful.
Thankfully though they managed to plug the wound, a feat which at first wasn’t deemed possible thanks to the puncture sitting on the shoulder of the tyre and not in amongst the actual tread as what usually the prerequisite for plugging a hole is.
Oh, and just to rub salt into the wound I discovered that my back brake light was out and needs to be replaced, but worse than that, my CV boot isn’t looking all that healthy and the rather helpful guy doing the wheel alignment for me pointed out that it would actually be cheaper for me to replace the whole axle instead of keep patching up the problems on the CV joints.
I told him I’ll get to it when I get to it.
Ah, and I had to line someone’s hand with silver thanks to a covert fixing of a stopper on my shocks when he was replacing the strut mountings. I don’t normally like doing business that way, but what the hell, the place was costing me enough money already as it is.
Anyway, after a long and drawn out visit at Hi-Q (though their service and helpfulness was top notch as always), the bill came to a hefty R2300 (which I guess isn’t all that bad if you consider I replaced all four tyres and got my strut mountings done, but it does sting a bit when you consider this comes straight off the back of my whole clutch release arm debacle and so doesn’t leave me in the greatest of financial positions for the rest of this month). Sometimes it’s tough owning a car!
*sigh*
Well at least I know my bokkie still loves me because she phoned to tell me that she was taking me out to the Spur for supper in order to cheer me up – thanks Babes, feeling better already! :)