Forty-seven-year old Olawuyi Sheyi learnt automotive repairs from 1983 to 1987 in the Kaduna metropolis, specialising in Japanese cars like Toyota, Honda and Nissan.
After setting off on his own practice for a few years, Sheyi felt he had had enough repairing cars. To him, the strenuous efforts that the job demanded were not just worth the financial returns. What to do? He abandoned his workshop and auto repairs and resorted to buying vehicle spare parts from Togo.
But at a point, he realized that even the new business was not yielding the desired income, so he returned to the craft in which he had acquired skills; he began to repair cars again, but specializing in repairing gearboxes, an aspect of car repair that many automobile technicians find too hand to handle.
This time, Sheyi seems to have hit a gold mine, so to speak. Today, in Kaduna, his name is synonymous with repair of the gearbox of all type of cars.
Well, not all types of the gearbox. Sheyi admitted that while he would readily handle the manual gearbox, he would rather give the automatic gearbox a wide berth. He told Daily Trust that he stopped repairing automatic gearboxes because it is a delicate job to do and once in a while, things could just go wrong.
While many car owners would, he said, not look the way of gear mechanics again once their jobs have been well effected, they would not hesitate to reduce a gear mechanic to a moron in the presence of his apprentices and other customers if the repair job was not perfect. Customers, Sheyi declared, don’t have the politeness and decent language to inform gear mechanics that their gearboxes are still not in good order. “So I had to get wise and stay away from repairing automatic gearboxes to protect my good name and image,” he said.
The gearbox expert identified a major problem of a gearbox as shortage of oil. Many drivers, he said, can be careless, driving their cars day in, day out without caring to check the gear oil level. When the oil level is low, some metals within the box lose shape due to lack of lubrication and cannot fully engage a shift to move a car freely.
Sheyi advised car owners to immediately consult experts in gearbox repair whenever they notice any slight noise in gear shift, and to regularly check the gear oil level.
He stated that caution on a gearbox has become necessary because repairing or replacing any comes quite high. The price of an expensive car’s gearbox, he informed, is more than the price of a medium-budget car. He said the most expensive gearboxes are those of 4-wheel drive or sport utility vehicles, also called jeeps by some, which he said cost from N600,000 to N1 million. Gearboxes for old brands of jeeps can, however, be procured for between N250,000 and N100,000, depending on the brand type. Owners of low-cost cars can replace their vehicles’ manual gearboxes for as low as N20,000 for, for example, a Toyota Corolla (Cricket) and N10,000 for a Volkswagen Golf 1 and 2 brands.
Sheyi has trained many youths in the gearbox repair craft, many of whom now have their own workshops across the country. He currently has six apprentices, including his biological son who applies his school holidays fully to acquiring the skill.
Sheyi complements the repair job with buying and selling fairly used gear boxes.
