Practically Classics Forum

I think that this thread needs at least one pro-Halfords post, so here it is:
Much about whether Halfords are any use to the classic car fraternity depends upon location and whether their staff in a particular store are interested in their work and motoring generally.
The Cramlington branch (Just 20 odd miles south of me and the nearest one) is good. The manager doesn't look at the customer as though he or she has two heads when they ask for bits for older cars as he's something of an enthusiast himself and he is ex-trade. It shows.
Another of the store's full-time staff is old car mad, having owned and restored several interesting things himself. He didn't bat an eyelid when I first asked him to try and find out what, if anything, they could source for the Dolomite. Some hard to find parts were tracked down and at prices below typical eBay levels too; upper ball joints - ordinarily requiring a second mortgage if they're needed - were sourced from one of the store's local suppliers and sold to me at roughly a third of their Rimmer Bros price.
Various bushes and bearings were again sourced with relative ease by the same staff member and at similarly fair prices that made the usual trip to town pointless.

I had some Sienna touch up made, in aerosol form, by a keen young fella at the Kingston Park branch, near Newcastle. He found the code for this long-obsolete BL colour easily enough but made sure that he had the correct information by coming out to the car park and looking at the commission plate details. Once there, car-related conversation lasted a good 15 minutes and would probably have lasted longer had I not been in a bit of a rush.

I agree with the point made earlier about their paint mixing being a bit of a messy process and yes, some floor got splashed, but the colour match was perfect and they gave me loads of spare nozzles to play with.

So there it is, a pro-Halfords post.

All of that said; the Berwick and Silverlink branches seemed to be staffed by people who'd rather be somewhere else, very few of whom have the slightest understanding of the purpose of most of the car parts that they sell.

This is spooky..... despite my dislike of the Silvelink branch I too was about to sing the praises of the Cramlington branch, it being somewhat better, but I have been beaten to it.

Seems we are not that far apart JPB?

Anyway I think the moral we can draw from this is that a key member (or two) of staff can make world of difference to an outlets success.
So if anyone from Halfords is looking in..... ..... well anyway, it is sound retail practice to put the customer first. *cough*

I spend most of my time in Ellington, I also spend the odd night in the Town, depending on whether the phone rings and who's on the other end when I answer it. .
Which corner of our ruddy great big lovely green county do you call home?

me again,

my point was mainly aimed at the website,

as to store service, im one of those individuals that hit the shops knowing exactly what i want, and try not to ask for help, i know, i know, im a typical bloke, so all hail to the good Halford stores. Im honestly not knocking them, i do still use them.

But the web site has no intelligence, it doesnt even prime the shopper for theyre visit, an instance where a shopper could look, find, write down exactly what they can get at the local shop, for those that have the fear of purchasing on lin(many still do) , but the site doesnt let them do that. Obviuosly i mean car parts, not tents.

Argos is what they should aim for, look , research, find and lay away your component(s), and then go to the shop , no doubt you would bring the bits you need back, and some more odds n ends, much to Mr Halfords delight im sure.

Halfords recently offered A/F sets of their - very high quality - ratchet combination spanners on the website only, at less than a third of the usual price. I reserved them on the site, went to the store to collect, no problem at all. Perhaps it's relevant that their site isn't optimised for Internet Exploder? Whenever I've reserved parts or tools this way the process has been straightforward enough and my discount is always recognised so I think that this is relevant since the site is only as good as the local staff who are at the other end of the transaction.
If you use Safari, Chrome or Firefox then that's that theory out the window of course, but it would be useful to know.

JPB wrote:Halfords recently offered A/F sets of their - very high quality - ratchet combination spanners on the website only,

Yep, that's what I bought - but it took three stores before I could find one that actually had them in stock, regardless of what the website said. Very good value at £24.99, not so much at £74.99.
This was part of my perception that they no longer catered for enthusiasts - they were selling kit like this off cheap.

I'm not surprised they were selling them off cheap- they'd sit on the shelves forever otherwise, I mean, how much call would there be for sets of A/F ratchet spanners? Kudos to Halfords for even still stocking them!

mr rusty wrote:....I mean, how much call would there be for sets of A/F ratchet spanners?

Quite a bit I should think, they have a very fine check mechanism on them and are much thinner than some ratchet rings, so are ideal for hard to reach bits & pieces.

Not sure on that one JPB: there doesn't seem to be that much demand for AF stuff these days. I suspect an increasing amount of practical classics will tend to be from the 80s on, where metric threads are more common. In fact, one of the reasons I started doing tractors up was because I had loads of AF spanners that never got used (I have had VWs as daily drivers for 20+ years and even Ma's Metros had metric threads).

Although I haven't been to many shows in the last couple of years, I always trawled round the trade stands for interesting and useful tools and most interest seemed to be with metric stuff. There was a shop in Penrith who had a large bin full of AF stuff that he was trying to sell off. I bought two or three good quality spanners from him for peanuts!

I'm not saying Halford's spanners are bad - I have a couple of AF ratched combis (the only two sizes the shop stocked) and a few more metric ones. They are nice spanners - as are the rest of their quality tools - and show no signs of age after ten or more years. However, I bought a set of AF ratchet combis at a show, American made (can't remember the make) that are superb - I can't feel the ratchet clicking at all and they are really slim. The feller had a pile of them and was selling them off cheap!

That's why I was surprised halfords had stock of such a tool in AF sizes. Even places like machine mart aren't carrying much of an Imperial range any more, there just isn't the demand for AF and it just takes up shelf space.

Most people who work on cars professionally, i.e. mechanics working every day in a normal garage, won't come across Imperial sizes for months on end, they're basically hobby tools now unless you specialise in old cars and given the increasingly wide use of torx and star fittings even the traditional hex socket is beginning to fall into disuse for engine work at least.