Fiat Punto - head gasket gone

Delancey

I have a 1999 Fiat Punto 1.2 - great little car that has never given me a days trouble till last night when the temperature went off the scale and past the red.
Garage tell me it's the cylinder head gasket has failed , to repair will be circa 400 quid . The thing is the garage are advising against repair as there is a good chance '' it won't be sucessful '' meaning that in a few week or months I could be back to square one.

Frankly I can't help feeling that they just couldn't be bothered doing a job on it and would rather I went away and put the repair money toward another car ( this garage does NOT sell cars by the way ).

Anyone here have any experience of this ? Is it really possible I will be throwing good money after bad or should such a repair prove effective ?

Fol20

I had a 00 punto..the head gasket went in that one as well.I sold it for a few hundred and then bought another cheap punto.maybe you could do the same..Hope this helps

beagle001

Op,
Not worth sinking any money into it,possibly will go again and you can pick up decent cars nowadays for 1000 01-02

Riamfada

I had a Fiat Bravo which showed the following symptoms in this order

• gear stick rattling in neutral
• heater only blowing cold
• engine temp off the scale
• big pop under the bonnet & lots of smoke
• lost power to the engine

The head gasket had blown. It cost me 600 euro to repair and when I collected it from the garage it made a noise like someone was banging the engine with a jackhammer. Made it 1km down the road the the power died again. Sold it to the garage for 400 euro.

You wont get much for a 99 Punto anyway, best to scrap it. Sorry.

Nissan doctor

IMO if they say there is a good chance it won't be successful then you should take it somewhere else, that's is comical!

If a competent mechanic does the work correctly and all the tolerances etc are checked properly as well as the cause of the temperature issue(head gasket is unlikely to fail on its own, a water leak, failed rad fan etc would likely cause it to overheat and the HG to fail)being diagnosed then the engine will be perfect afterwards.

IMO saying it might not work is blatant incompetence and them covering their arses for when their shoddy work fails.

€400 is not a bad price, but you'd get it done correctly for that!



@Grimes, please tell me your joking...so the garage made a balls of fixing your car, and then ended up with your car and €200 of your money I'm really sorry to say but its no wonder that these dodgy garages are still operating with such gullible people around:eek:

MagicMarker

The car is barely worth €400, it's not worth it tbh.

Fair play to the garage for being straight up with you, they could have just taken the 400 quid off ya no bother.

MagicMarker

MagicMarker wrote: »

Fair play to the garage for being straight up with you, they could have just taken the 400 quid off ya no bother.

As the Nissan Doctor chap mentioned, they're not really being straight at all, they seem to be complete and utter f***tards. So too the other crowd mentioned who "fixed" the other chaps car, total and utter clowns.

Grimes wrote: »

I had a Fiat Bravo which showed the following symptoms in this order


gear stick rattling in neutral
heater only blowing cold
engine temp off the scale
big pop under the bonnet & lots of smoke
lost power to the engine

.

Going forward if you stop driving when the heater blows cold air you may not cook the engine so much