Off the road since 2009 and stored in a barn near Nunney, which is a polite way of saying the brake lines had rotted through and something had lived in the airbox. We took it in stages so the owner could pay in stages: fuel system and tank first, then brakes and hoses front to back, then the cooling system, then Ray on the carburettors for two full Thursdays. It passed its MOT in March with two advisories, both cosmetic. Total across five months, £4,180 including parts — roughly a third of what a restoration shop quoted for the same work in one go.

Came in on a recovery truck with a main-dealer estimate for a gearbox. Tomas spent an hour on the ramp with live data and found a failed speed sensor on the output shaft, £38 plus an hour and a half to get at it. We photographed the sensor on the bench and sent it to the owner before we ordered the replacement, because a claim like that is worth nothing without the picture. Final invoice £212 including VAT. The car is still with us and passed its fourth MOT here in November.

A local kitchen-fitting firm was losing a van a fortnight to unplanned breakdowns because nothing was serviced until it stopped. We put all six on a rolling twelve-week inspection, staggered so only one is ever off the road, and moved the two worst vans onto shorter oil intervals because of how they are driven. Unplanned downtime went from eleven days in the previous year to one. The invoice is bigger and the year cost them less, which is the whole argument for planned maintenance in a single line.

A 2014 Leaf came in with a battery down to eight bars and an owner hoping for a cheap fix before a house move. There is not one. A refurbished pack was more than the car was worth, and we said so, in writing, and charged nothing for the half hour it took to find out. She sold it at auction the following week and bought something sensible. We would rather lose a £4,000 job than take money for work that leaves somebody worse off — and she has since sent us two of her neighbours.

A parent rang in August about a £900 car bought for a seventeen-year-old, wanting to know whether it was a deathtrap. It was not, quite. It needed two tyres that were legal but perished, a rear brake pipe that would have failed the next MOT, a wiper motor and a headlight aim that was pointing at the hedgerow. Four hundred and eleven pounds quoted, three hundred and forty invoiced because the pipe took less time than we allowed for. We do not round up when a job comes in under, and that is the whole reason people send us their children.

Every one of them started with somebody being told a number they could not check. A gearbox, a restoration, a fleet contract, a battery pack — all quoted elsewhere, none of them explained. The only thing we do differently is show our working: the photograph of the failed part, the measurement in millimetres, the estimate itemised into parts and labour so you can see which is which. It is not a marketing position, it is just cheaper for us than arguing about invoices, and it turns out customers rather like it.