I saw a few people saying don't trust mech repair shops that are clean, and that you gotta go to the ones that are dirty and have crap everywhere 'cause they'll do a proper job and fix your rig cheaper and better.
While I agree in general, it's an even better sign if that shop has that *one* bay and workbench area that is conspicuously clean. Every good workshop has *that bay*.
That's the bay for when they need to go cleanroom on something. Pulling and refurbishing laser arrays, injection pumps, etc. Manually recalibrating gyros. Re-valving joint dampers. Fabbing up "custom" bracketry to fit that aftermarket heat exchanger that's *supposed* to be a direct bolt on OE style replacement and you just *know* it's not going to be that simple cause it never is, but the efficiency is so much better than the factory crap and who the hell wants to pay for a new genuine exchanger anyway, if you can even get one?
The number of absolute cowboy techs I've seen that think that just because they've done a bunch of work on their pa's agricultural mechs for years, they know everything there is to know about mech internals, strip down and reassemble a combat-rated set of hand actuators literally just on the god damned shop floor, only to wonder why all the hydraulics piss fluid out as soon as they run it through a test cycle. They might *look* the same as pappy's mech actuators, but they have way tighter tolerances and they run *way* thinner fluids in them. You get so much as a nick in the sealing surface of one of those rods and it's not gonna seal again. And before any goobers come for me saying "JuSt RuN tHiCkEr OiL" if you put anything thicker than 2W-5 in those things they'll just lock up. Won't leak but you'll not be using that hand for anything but karate chopping your opposition.
Anyway rant over, TLDR next time your stompy death machine needs actual proper work done, and not just entire unit assemblies throwm at the problem, take it somewhere that actually cares to understand the concept of machined tolerances.
