Category: Servicing

Our first experience with a rebuild of a Fiat 500F engine. It was April this year (2019) when Rob limped his award winning 1969 Fiat 500 into the workshop. The engine sounding like a twenty year old Victa lawnmower that had never received a tune-up. Though it certainly did look brand new.

Rob had owned the car for roughly 2 years. Purchased off a Fiat restorer, this car had recently undergone a full restoration. Completely stripped, all rust repaired, new paint, suspension and steering components. No bolt was left un-turned, except for the engine.

Upon completion, it was entered into various classic car shows and won several awards. This is where Rob first saw the car and instantly fell in love with it. A deal was done, a cheque was written out and the Fiat now had a new home.

It looks great and has never been [...]

Looking back, roughly 15 years or so ago, diesel engines were commonly and widely used as the work horse engine of choice. While sometimes rather sluggish, noisy and more suited to a beat up old work ute or truck, they had plenty of torque which enabled them to haul massive amounts of weight without too much strain.

Their other advantage was the milage per full tank you could get out of them, even whilst towing a fully loaded tray. Their downside though, of course is the plumes of dirty black diesel exhaust fumes that they would spew out their tailpipes, filliing the atmosphere with Carbon Monoxide (CO), Hydrocarbons (HC), Nitric Oxide and Nitrogen Dioxide (NOx), and soot or Particulate Matter (PM). All of which have been scientifically proven to cause cancer in humans.

Now fast forward back to today and what you may not know is that the current Common Rail Diesel (CRD) engine is [...]

Quite often mistaken for a dead vehicle battery, the w204 bodied Mercedes-Benz C-class suffers from a fault that will unfortunately leave you stranded at the best of times.

Quite often we get a phone call from a customer telling us their car won’t start, even after replacing the battery.

While the fault is not as common as the dreaded timing rattle fault, (common on petrol 4 cyl models), it is something we have seen many times over the last 3 – 4 years. The first few times we had forwarded the customer on to dealerships, where our poor customers were charged large amounts of money to replace a part, that should not only have not failed to begin with, but were replacing these steering lock actuator modules with new ones that were exactly the same and not modified to ensure they won’t fail again.

When a loyal customer of ours, David, showed up in his newly acquired 1996 Mercedes-AMG w202 C36, we couldn’t wait to get stuck into restoring it’s original looks and performance.

Despite the gorgeous Mercedes ‘Ruby Pearl Metallic’ paintwork looking dull and covered in inches of dust, and the sound of the heavily AMG modified M104 engine clearly only running on 4 of its 6 cylinders, we were still in awe of this classic beast and immediately saw it’s potential!

For those of you who don’t know about the W202 Mercedes AMG C36, you won’t understand what makes this car special. So let’s start by giving you a quick run down on this classic beast…

Prior to 1990, Mercedes-Benz and AMG were seperate companies, with AMG being an aftermarket performance name responsible for completely remaking Mercedes-Benz vehicles into performance machines. In 1990, AMG signed a contract with Daimler-Benz [...]

Volkswagen Golf and Polo – Engine: CBZ 1.2L 4cyl Turbocharged TSi – Loud rattle from engine or no start.

Another common and frustrating timing issue we see regularly is the “stretched chain” always found in the Golf or Polo ‘CBZ’ 1.2 litre, 4 cylinder, turbo TSI Engine. This again, is caused by poor manufacturing materials used in the products being used in modern engines. It’s something we are seeing in all vehicles from all manufacturers.

Today though, we will be focusing on the CBZ engine and hopefully help save you thousands by explaining the symptoms and the repair required. Leaving it too long, will unfortunately end in major engine repairs as shown in the photo’s below. This poor customer unfortunately waited until total destruction occurred, which ended up costing thousands of dollars more than it had too.

This [...]

C&S Service Centre are the European vehicle roadworthy experts located in the Northern Melbourne suburb, Preston. We have four highly trained technicians, each with many years experience working on Euro cars, and two of whom are also licensed VicRoads accredited vehicle tester’s,

This means we are able to provide an accurate assessment of the vehicle condition and provide you with a Roadworthy Certificate when you are buying or selling a vehicle. You will also require a RWC if you are registering a car or attaching Heritage plates to your vehicle upon joining a car club. (Club Reg.)

*Inspections start at just $175.00. If the vehicle passes, you will receive the certificate the same day! If further work is required in order for the vehicle to pass, then the customer may elect to have the vehicle repaired by us at an extra cost, or they may have [...]

With this issue continuing to frustrate unsuspecting Mercedes C Class owners, we thought maybe we should go back to our initial write-up to continue helping those of you who may be suffering.

This time we look closer at the M271.9 “Kompressor” 4 cylinder found in the W203 and early W204 bodied Mercedes Benz C180 and C200. We explain why we believe they fail, how we can repair it for you while saving you hundreds if not thousands of dollars and we explain what parts we will replace. You can find out more about the M271.8 ” CGi” turbocharged motor, found in the W204 C200 and C250, in the earlier blog. Follow the link below to read it.

(You can read our first blog here)

Over a year has passed since we last touched on this topic and since then we have carried out these repairs more times than we ever imagined, gaining more quality experience, [...]

Ever wondered what it’s like to be a mechanic? How about a mechanic that runs his/her own workshop, a busy workshop, with a continuous and steady flow of jobs?

Well to put it plainly, while it is a great feeling of achievement to own your own workshop and a business, it’s a never ending amount of hard work, commitment, skill, learning and at times extremely stressful. Believe it or not, we’re not even talking about the physical aspect of actually being a mechanic or repairing cars yet. That’s right, being a Mechanic, or Technician as we are more commonly referred to as these days, is a tough job. Running a small business successfully is even harder. For those of you who aren’t familiar, let’s start with a few examples of whats involved in owning and [...]

Unfortunately we are seeing a common fault amongst the Mercedes-Benz W204 body C200 & C250 engines more often than we’d like to. Being Mercedes-Benz owners and fans ourselves, we hate seeing these beautiful cars having such a major issue.

The problem mainly affects the later version of the M271 variants of these engines fitted to these vehicles, which is the ‘M271.8 – CGi’ (turbo) that is found in W204 body Mercedes-Benz. Though we have seen similar issues in it’s older version ‘M271.9 – Kompressor’ (Supercharged), in which camshaft adjuster teeth wear away and cause damage to the timing components. The earlier Kompressor variant of the M271 was also found in the earlier W203 bodied C180 and C200.

Because this fault has to do with the timing of the engine, it can certainly lead to the engine needing major repairs or in worst case, complete engine failure due to possible valves contacting with pistons. So with [...]