Help with price of front suspension/steering repairs

[roush611]

I just had the front end of my 03 Tahoe pretty much rebuilt. The bill was quite a bit higher then I was expecting. I am hoping you all can say fair or that price is way out of the ball park.

I had the below replaced...

Idler Arm
Pitman Arm
Both inner tie rods
Both outter tie rods
All 4 ball joints
Both upper control arms
Both lower control arms
Alignment

The total bill came to $1,740. I noticed I was charged $325 per lower control arm. You think I was accidentally charged double for those as I am not seeing any anywhere near that price online. All the ball joints are moog.

 

[iLikeEggs]

Just for an example I looked at alldatadiy.com for my 2011 lower control arm and it called for 2.5 hours labor and $220 for the lower control arm which included the ball joint. Both sides combined labor was 4.8 hours.
Of course, your mileage may vary. Hopefully if they did all that work they combined some of the labor. Sometimes a shop will only charge half rate if the component has to come off anyway in order to replace something else. Did the ball joints come pre-installed the control arms? If so hopefully they didn't charge you labor for ball joints. Front end jobs don't come cheap though. Most shops will either do menu pricing on individual components or quote you from the labor guide.
Get and alldatadiy account. It's cheap and will give, an accurate guide line on what to expect for repairs, as well as parts diagram, procedures and TSB's.

 

[cmc76]

rock auto has an ac delco with the ball joint for $222. Even if the shop put 20% on parts, sounds iffy. unless you got something REALLY special......
Ive done front end work on light duty and heavy duty trucks. on a Tahoe, light duty, really isn't that bad of a job. I would ask for a P & L breakdown. but the 325 on the control arm seems a bit pricey.

 

[Bigbertha78]

Replaced everything you stated above for $550 and did all the repairs myself. After seeing the shop want $1200 for only upper and lower ball joints, figured I would do everything for way cheaper.

 

[iLikeEggs]

rock auto has an ac delco with the ball joint for $222. Even if the shop put 20% on parts, sounds iffy. unless you got something REALLY special......
Ive done front end work on light duty and heavy duty trucks. on a Tahoe, light duty, really isn't that bad of a job. I would ask for a P & L breakdown. but the 325 on the control arm seems a bit pricey.

To be fair, most shops have to order parts out. While they get a jobber price break on their cost, they still need to mark up the part to still make a buck. Generally, Mark up is about 40% on average.

 

[roush611]

Thanks for all the replies. Part of the expense is my fault. They used all MOOG parts including the whole control arm. The MOOG control arms run about $300 online. I could have told him to use lesser brand stuff but I was not paying attention.

 

[iLikeEggs]

Never feel bad about buying quality.

 

[roush611]

If I drove the car daily I definitely wouldn't. It currently sits with 110,000 and gets driven about 4K a year.

 

[MrBalll]

That's it? Yeah, probably wouldn't have put MOOG on if you had a choice with only 4k a year.

Like mentioned earlier, ask them for a more detailed breakdown of what you were charged for.

 

[Rocket Man]

The upper and lower control arms come with ball joints, just so you know. I just did about identical repairs with Moog parts. I bought the parts but for the lower ball joints, I just did ball joints since the control arms were expensive. I also got the Moog idler arm bracket. Mines a Denali and the front axles had to be pulled but overall it was about the same, $600 parts and $900 labor. I was going to do it myself but couldn't have my rig down for more than a day. Another shop quoted me $1200 labor. Guess they didn't want the work!