£900 for labour to fix timing chain on corsa?

tina92

Hi there,

My corsa life has broken down its 5 years old and I have been quoted £900 for labour alone to fix the timing chain so the garage says. What do you think?


tina

maninthestreet

It would be a timing belt, rather than a chain, surely? Has the belt snapped? If so, that normally results in severe damage to the engine.

TimBuckTeeth

If it does have a timing chain then it will be deep inside the engine, requiring a lot of work to replace.
If it is a snapped belt (and most likely with a snapped chain also) then the valves can be damaged by the pistons hitting them, needing quite a bit of work to replace them.

mardatha

We had a quote for £500 and that was for a cosworth Scorpio V6 engine , so that sounds very high for a wee Corsa... Did you carry on with noises coming from it ? is there any engine damage ? And dont go to a vauxhall dealers , they charge more. My husband says you should have got 100 thou miles plus out of that chain he thinks.

TighterThanTwoCoatsOfPain

the chain is unlikely to be "deep inside", far from it if its anything like the Astra 2.2 which is also chain driven.

Which engine is it? a mate of ine had a clio sport... he needed a new cam belt. 1.2 = £190, 2.0 = 750!! only difference was the larger engine resticted access to the belt which needed the subframe dropping! nightmare.

Ionkontrol

You could get a second hand engine out of a crashed car fitted for considerably less that £900.

TimBuckTeeth

TighterThanTwoCoatsOfPain wrote: »

the chain is unlikely to be "deep inside", far from it if its anything like the Astra 2.2 which is also chain driven.

I'm not familiar with Vauxhall engines, I thought timing chains were usually an internal engine part compared with belts.

brazilianwax

The timing chain in a vectra (SRI) isn't too deep - my OH's went last weekend at 110,000 miles.

Were quoted 350 for that, another 150 for the secondary belt to be replaced, more to open the engine up again because one of the cylinders is misfiring.......

but it's been a great car until now so would rather fix than replace.

chain didn't break - it rattled very loudly for the 160 miles home, then shook the car almost off the drive before coming loose, so hopefully no valve damage