On 12/4/2010 9:56 AM, Ed Pawlowski wrote:

"George" wrote
In PA private garages do the inspections. The neighborhood place we
use gives the area a quick wipe with lacquer thinner on a paper towel
to clean up the goo.

PA inspection is a sad state of affairs, at least when I used to live
there.
Rip off garages that wanted to sell expensive unneeded repairs.
Stations that slapped a sticker on and inspected nothing. (I called it
Coffee with Frank). You had to stay there for 20 minutes minimum in case
he was being watched.
Garages that found the same problem on every car, but you did not
complain because they did not check ball joints and such, just took your
five bucks for a headlight adjustment. I took three cars in one day to
such a shop. None should have legitimate passed, so we happy paid the
small surcharge.


"Lick & stick" is the common name for the procedure of getting a sticker
without an inspection.

The inspection stations are now monitored by some sort of quasi police
force. According to the guy who owns the garage where I go most seem to
be retired state police. He won't do lick & stick inspections simply on
principle but he is sensible. One of our vehicles has a tiny chip in the
arc of the wiper blades and that should be reason to fail.

There is a fairly large garage nearby (8 bay) that lost their inspection
license last year because they didn't catch that one character of the
VIN listed on the title was different than the VIN on the vehicle. The
car was later involved in some illegal activity and this was discovered.
Apparently part of the inspection is holding the owners card in one hand
and comparing it to the VIN label character by character.