How a job goes
Six steps, and you hold paper after two of them
Nothing here is unusual. It is written down because most shops do roughly this and almost none of them tell you in advance, which is how you end up standing at a counter reading an invoice for work you never agreed to.
The six steps
The call
You tell us what it is doing and, if there is a trip involved, when you leave. That date changes the answer more than anything else you can tell us, so we ask it first. We will not quote a repair on the phone from a description — we have never once been right doing that, and a number given blind becomes a number you expect.
Ten minutes · no price given
The walk
The rig gets walked in a fixed order: roof, then the outside skin and seams, then the running gear, then gas, then electrical, then inside. Fixed order matters because a busy bay skips whatever is not in front of it. You are welcome to stand there for it, and plenty of people do.
Two to four hours depending on the rig
The log
Every item gets a line: what it is, what state it is in, what it costs. Passes are written down as passes with a zero next to them. So are the refusals. This is the sheet on the home page, and it exists whether or not any work follows.
You keep it · we keep a copy
The written estimate
Separately from the log: parts, labor hours, and a line for anything we recommend leaving alone with the reason. Nothing is ordered, opened up or fitted before you have read it and said yes. If a part has a long lead time, that is on the estimate too, because a two-week part on a one-week trip is a decision, not a detail.
In writing, before anything happens
The work
If we open something up and it is worse than the estimate, you get a phone call before the extra work starts. If it is better than the estimate, the invoice comes down. Both directions, every time.
You are called before anything changes
The log again
At the end you get the sheet a second time, marked up: what was done, what was measured afterwards, torque figures where they matter, and what we deliberately did not touch. Two sheets from one job means you can hold the second against the first.
Hold sheet two against sheet one
Why the zeroes are on the sheet
A line that reads $0.00 is doing more work than any of the priced ones. It is the only part of an inspection you can audit later. If we write “brake linings 4.1–4.4 mm, no work” and a shop down the road tells you next month that your brakes are finished, you have a written measurement with a date on it and a reason to ask a second question.
It also keeps us honest in the other direction. It is a great deal harder to invent a problem when the habit of the shop is to write down the things that are fine.
The refusal on the home page — six tires, not sold, zero dollars — is on the log for the same reason. It cost us a sale and it is the line we would want to read if the rig were ours.
What we need from you
- The date you leave, if there is one. Everything schedules around it.
- Whether the rig has been sitting, and roughly how long. A rig that sat is a different job.
- Any work done elsewhere recently, especially anything involving the roof, the gas system or the axles.
- Keys to everything — the compartment locks and the battery box included.
- An honest answer about how it is loaded, because we set tire pressures from weight.
Start here
Book the walk, not the repair
Almost every job that goes badly started with somebody trying to buy a repair before anybody had looked. Book the inspection, read the log, then decide.