OMG I got the quote back for my gearbox!

[St Lunatic]

Well the guy from the gearbox place just told me he can fix the car for 17k, now thats weird.

zaleonardz , i drove my mates 325i and i love the manual gearbox idea. and i think the car will pull muh better with the manual gearbox. but i sit in traffic alot so i auto would be nice.

And if one day i want to sell the car i would be a bit worried that i would get a good price after the conversion.

But im leaning more towards manual

 

[zaleonardz]

To answer that, you have a hydraulically assisted clutch, which is as light as a feather, so although you have to use the clutch, its really not that bad.

Further, your car like most of us, has no resale value, and the price on trade in will be determined virtually by year and kilo's, so I would not even worry about that.

 

[St Lunatic]

always good words of wisdom!

 

[zaleonardz]

The 25k is damm insane, but the calculation is not that difficualt.

A massive portion of the repair is the labour, and it is a relatively big job to take the box out and refit, about. 5 hours if you know what your doing.

Further, stripping out the box and taking it apart means new oil, about 17L, now at R200 per litre for the dealer stuff, and thats just the oil, they all use the R50 per litre equiv... but dont tell you that.

Next there is the actual labour of stipping out the internals on the gearbox, buying the right spares, oil seals bla bla bla, although the parts are reasonable, it all adds up. Example, a OEM gearbox oil filter for a 5HP30 is 700 from BMW with a 25% discount.

Then there is the testing, if you do not have a test bench for that specific vehicle, it means the only way to test it is to put it in and run it, god forbid it has to come out again cause a spring or something is out of alignment...

Then the warentee you have to offer your customer, cause you cannot replace all the parts inside, else it would be 100k job, so you take risk as well on the internals currently still left in the box.

The electronics also make things interesting.

You factor all of that with a R300 an hour labour rate, and thats why you get to 15 to 25k.

 

[Ricky318i]

my two cents: go refurbished. if you evaluate that versus the manual swap and replacement, then I'd do that.

 

[St Lunatic]

zaleonardz, ye i agree with what you are saying.

Oil alone im looking at like 4k labour like 3-4k so excluding parts its sitting around 7-8k

So i can understand why it costs so much, it was just a bit of a shock when it happened.