We were the ones telling him he needed a new motor.
Not so much for the oil pluming out the rear end, more of the fact that the motor has extremely inconsistant compression and might knock...
This guy originally came to us to tune his sweet car with the typical sweet setup, bolt-on turbo that looked huge (fiddy trim), way to large of injectors, s-afc II to control it all, and hopes and dreams of being the baddest guy on the block. Well needless to say he had attempted to tune it himself before bringing it in, as the car ran like shit. The oil drain line was kinked (which was realized after a few pulls on the dyno) and it made dink for power.
Well the 7 bolt spun a bearing on the dyno. The assembly job done on the setup he put together was awesome....if you had a bunch of 5 year olds assemble it with tools they found while walking around the walmart tool section.
We offered to build him a motor, he declined. Finally he convinced us to install a used motor he sourced....oh yeah we ALL know where this is going.
He gets this sweet engine off ebay and ships it to us. Well this oil pan was twisted more than a fresh pretzel hot out of the oven. The front motor mount is bet, and the motor looks like it was pulled out of a demo derby car. We pull the pan and actually find a cracked oil pump and broken off pick-up tube!
Well we immediately inform him that this "like new, runs great motor" is probably not going to work so well for him. He gets mad at us, accusing us of trying to make him buy a 'race motor' and tells us to put the motor in.
So we replace the oil pump and rusted timing belt components and drop it in, but not before taking a few dozen pictures. Well the vehicle finally starts and works great. Well works great if you were indending to build a ugly ass bug duster. The vehicle smokes badly and the compression was something aweful like 100-80-140-70 or something. The rings were shot!
Again we inform him that well, he's fucked and should try to get some money back on this "guaranteed" engine. He proceeds to tell us he wants it "dyno tuned" so he can pull it in and out of his garage until the body work is done, then he'll build an engine. I figure sure, whynot, and "tune it" so it idles as close to normal as possible and doesn't spit raw gas/oil out the rear end. I think I rolled into the gas once, saw it get to a safe afr and make a whopping 140hp at like 14psi around 4800rpm and just told him "this is as far as I am taking this engine".
We didn't charge him for the dyno time and comp'd him huge on the motor install as we felt bad for this dude, he couldn't catch a break.
Well enter a few months later when there is a substantial amount of $$ missing from our account. This douch-tool actually filed with his credit card a "unsatisifactory work" claim and charged back the entire repair. Over one year later we finally win our money back in court, but not after he'd gone over to another "speed shop" (Hi-Performance Art) which told him it was running rich and swapped in stock injectors. The car ran "great" and they charged him a ton of diagnostic time, showed proof with their 5 gas analyzer, etc... (we saw a copy of his invoice in the 47odd page paperwork/claim that was sent back and forth between the shop and the credit card processor) They further proceeded to bad mouth us and told him the compression was an even 140 aross the board. Man I wish we would have just used those cheap ass ebay compression testers as well.
I should have filed a mechanics lean against this pos and charged the $150/hr I made on the dyno for the 20 hours it took to sort this out.
And people wonder why we are happy to be no-longer open.
Bloody Seal Bounce Champion!
Yeah it's my ass, but you can look!!!
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