Alan dirty dog transmissions

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sleeper bird

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Ok first of all this pains me to even have to post this,I hold everyones opinion on the board very highly,but this one got me good.
I talked to alan quite a few months ago about building my transmission,i did not mind paying a little more to back a sponsor and get a good product.First i was told it would be 1,400.00 - 1,500.00 max shipped to me in louisiana.Well i will be honest and say that it took me aprox two months and a few payments to get it paid for.When the final payment was to be sent it was over 1,700.00,there were a bunch of talk about the shipping not being included,but i know better when you say a price an this sort of money you dont forget about a few hundred bucks.That being said ,i said what the hell i just want to get it and move on.
Almost four weeks go by and still no transmission,finally i called and there was some issue with him and ups,so finally i got the transmission and converter.
put the transmission in and about a week goes by and my girlfriend tells me that something is wrong(this is her car by the way)I thought she was loosing her mind so i drove it,it seemed to have a little delay in between drive and od.I said what the hell it will be fine.The next day she drives up honking the horn and says to take a ride,No od what so ever.Checked fluid everything was good,on the way back to the house (about 1/4 mile away)lost drive.you could smell burning clutches.
Called alan and was told it was electrical,thought the speed sensor was bad but it was not but i changed it anyway,no change.Calles alan again and he said electrical and to get trouble codes.Paid a shop to use a scanner and tell me what they get,In one word nothing at all no codes and no third and od.The shop i used said it was some sort of pressure problem,I thought to myself they are not a transmission shop so i shrugged it off.Meanwhile called alan again i got every excuse from tps to ecu to nuetral safety switch,changed the safety switch just to be sure,same thing no drive or od.
Man im a little upset by now i had a tow truck bring it to a tranny shop,they ran electrical tests and said it was internal,By this time im like 300.00 in the hole plus the cost of the transmission,By now this has gone to far and Kathy needed her car fixed,Had to pay the transmission shop 1,550.00 they said the sprag gear went out and burnt up the clutches,and the valve body plate was covered with rust,An unusual amount of rust.Talked to alan and asked if there was any way that he could help me out with the cost of the rebuild.Well basically he said it was not his fault and that burnt clutch plates were in his eyes normal(i sent pictures of the parts that were changed)
So what i had purchased was a 1,750.00 rebuild that lasted less than a week over 300.00 in shop charges to try to find an electrical problem that was not there,towing and 1,550.00 for another rebuild and converter.Not to mention the personal issues that i had to deal with making excuses for alan to Kathy as to why her car has been down for damn near two months,and spending more money than i was told in the beginning for someone that does not back up their work,and has excuses for everything.I dont know about everyone else here but 1,750.00 is alot of money

If you do not live near alan where he can fix any screw ups i would seriously consider someone local,and even if you do live near him he will probably put it off on something else.The only recourse that i have is fraud protection on my cc,i have never had to use it but i will now.
 
An update,went back to the shop that did the second rebuild with the sprag gear that was replaced to find out exactly what was wrong with it and he showed me that it was like a ratchet and the internal part was suppose to turn one direction but it was locked up.Sure enough it was seized it would not budge,and while i was there he wanted me to be aware that the vent was completely plugged up with mud or dirt,he had forgotten to tell me,although this probably did not cause the failure.I got arrox 30 miles out of the first rebuild total,and drove it today around 100 miles round trip with no issues or burning smells like the other.
I also was informed by Alan that he gave no warranty for the work.
 
I never told you there was no warranty you never even mentioned sending the transmission to me for warranty, you took it to a local shop paid them to do it and then told me you want money. You lie through your teeth I helped you try to diagnose the thing time and time again hours on the phone, for nothing. You told me after a few days your speedometer stopped working, then you lost 3rd gear a few days later. I am confident the problem was not internal to the transmission and something in your controls or cooler caused this problem.
Had you sent the transmission to me I would have fixed it anyway, but all you did was say give me money. For the record I charged you $250 in labor to take a late transmission and change it over for your application. It was never a built transmission anyway it was a used transmission changed to fit so that it could be "CHEAP". You cheaped out on everything until you assumed I would refund you money. You have all the parts you paid for, the diode is only locked up because it is contaminated. Probably from the blown pieces of roller clutch that were jammed in your cooler that you never replaced. I have tried to help you every bit of the way all you want to do is throw a fit because you did everything as cheap as possible then want to blame everyone else and make someone else pay for it.
I told you in the first place the best scenario was to bring me the car, had that happened I could have made sure everything was done right. Heck you didn't even know how to adjust the range sensor you had that wrong in the first place. You complain bringing the car to me would have cost too much time and money but the way I see it you spent more time and money by doing it yourself instead of having it done professionally.
BTW all I guarantee on a job where I change a used transmission over to fit an application is that my work was done correctly and it was, your transmission builder found nothing wrong with my work and neither did you. It was still a used transmission, but it fit your car after I changed it over.
You should cut that diode open and see what is jamming it, I suspect it is a part of your old blown up roller clutch that was stuck in your cooler.
Don't forget to mention the parts I lost that you owe me. The output shaft, shift lever and extension housing that I should have charged you a high deposit for but did not.
I knew this job would be trouble when you started that crap of sending me $200 now then $200 a few weeks later over and over....I even suggested save it and send it all at once but you didn't want to do that.
I am not paying for your screw up and never authorized you to pay aamco to rebuild it at my expense so I will not pay for anything they did either. All I told you to do was have it properly scanned because I figured it was a bad solenoid or something. You chose to have them take the transmission apart instead, then gave me 3 different stories of what was wrong with it, none of which make any sense at all.
If you wanted me to do anything for you, you would have needed to show me where I had done something wrong. You still have not shown me anything I did wrong, well besides dealing with you of course. I will go out of the way to fix mistakes I make, it happens. In this case there do not appear to be any that I can see, or your transmission builder either. You showed me a burnt direct clutch and a diode that got contaminated by something. The fact that the transmission worked for a week tells me the transmission was assembled correctly. The fact that it failed after a long drive tells me your cooler had trash in it and overheated the transmission.
I did offer you to bring the car to me and I would fix it after the fact as well, just because the warranty isn't what you dreamed it should be doesn't mean there was not a warranty. If you had bought the transmission from jasper they would not have guaranteed it the way you want, neither would the dealer or aamco. I told you to bypass the radiator and install an aftermarket cooler, you had a better plan...and now thats my fault? I don't think so.
Alan
 
Oh and the cost I quoted you $1300-$1500 for the transmission alone. Then I sold you a converter at half price just to help out, originally you were going to arrange shipping but in the end I got stuck with it. The surface rust on the seperator plate is probably from the transmission sitting here for 2 weeks completely empty in high humidity because you still had to pay me the final payment. I admit the seperator plate did have some surface rust on it when I took it apart, that happens with cores I sanded it off the first time and by no means does it make them unuseable you just clean them up and put them back on. I have a drawer full of those plates and they all look that way. What you say was excuses was me trying to help you diagnose it, obviously the right thing to do would have been to say send it back to me then you wouldn't be on here complaining that I tried to help you diagnose it and calling that excuses.
No good deed goes unpunished.....
Alan
 
Just to keep this straight,I paid four payments,the first and second slip my mind i was trying to make sure you had the money to source a transmission from a yard before i expected anything from you.Kathys car was still driving in drive and she used it to go to work and back.It took two months for you to get a unit after you got aprox a 775.00 deposit due to weather i was told by you.And by the way the first time we talked i told you that i was working with limited funds and i understood that untill you got what you needed you were not going to put yourself out.
The next payment was for 400.00 on 4/16/13 you still had not done anything to my knowlege,due to your back issues.I understand there are unseen issues when it come to things like that,i did not push you.although i would have thought that you have been paid well over half something should be going on,But like you stated i paid in payments so i could see where i would be put on the back burner.
your next payment was on 7/14/13 for 575.00 the total which was over three hundred dollars more than what we had originally discussed.When you are working on a budget and as i am a numbers man, i do not forget these sort of things,But i said man lets just be done with this and move on.When you first called me and told me it was done and ready to ship it was aprox 7/10/13 so it sat for aprox one week due to me getting you your money.It sat untill 8/12/13 before you shipped it to me and the only reason that i got it on 8/13/13 was because i had ups hold it and went and picked it up(i did this to save a day)
So it was not due to me letting it sit for a month after you were paid in full it was due to you.( and as a side note i dissasembled my old transmission for the parts that you needed and threw the extra parts on the side of my garage in the weather and rain and my old valve body plate looked new compared to the one that was in the unit you sent to me)
As far as the countless hours that you say you tried to help me troubleshoot what was going on,it was probably 5 calls for maybe 2 minutes , and before i could even get out of my mouth that it had lost two gears,you were telling me about the delay between drive and od was normal out of a ford product.Then you told me to have a scan run on the car after that came back good you still were adament that it was electrical,i sent it to another shop same thing ecu commanding correctly transmission locked up in second.
So after four days of paying other people to fix an electrical problem that did not exhist, i had enough and sent it to a company called area transmission(not aanco)which i had used before to diagnose a problem that aanco had told me i needed a rebuild on a f150 that i owned a few years back but they were honest and said that i did not.So that is how i ended up there not aanco.This company has been around for 30 years and completely honest.
within an hour they had it dissasembled and showed me that the sprag gear was locked up,clutch disk were completely burnt and the valve body plate rusted,and after going back today he had forgot to tell me that the vent was completely clogged up with dirt.You told me that the sprag locked up was due to contamination,you are probably correct,with the rust and dirt that was plugged up in the top vent i am not supprised.
My system was flushed before it was installed so unless castrol is putting something in their fluid i dont know where it came from.
Lets make no mistake i understood that sending to someone else was going to be a problem,But the car had been down to long and shipping and expecting to get it back in a reasonable amount of time was not going to happen,All i asked from you was can you work with me on the cost and that was not going to happen.
You got your money and thats all that matters it seems, and its everyones problem but yours.Believe me everyone makes mistakes i know this,but putting the belame on anything and everything but the obvious is not good .Had a nice silver paint job though i will say that.
 
Again im not a transmission tech but i do know for 1750.00 it should be able to make it more than 28 miles.It does not take a transmission tech to figure that out.It had issues from day one, i just didnt think Kathy knew what she was talking about.I will listen next time.Lesson learned
 
Again im not a transmission tech but i do know for 1750.00 it should be able to make it more than 28 miles.It does not take a transmission tech to figure that out.It had issues from day one, i just didnt think Kathy knew what she was talking about.I will listen next time.Lesson learned

I've worked in the automotive industry for over 12 years, sometimes even the brand new ones break man. Of course when you are doing business far away it takes more effort from your part regardless, then you have a problem and that makes things more complicated. Bottom line is even if Alan did mess up, you should have given him the transmission back. If that wasn't convenient, then get your wallet out.

Alan did a transmission for me several years back, I live far away from him also. I had the same good intentions as you. You just have to be prepared that if something goes wrong, its going to be a pain. Your not dealing with a small part, you are dealing about 80 parts that have the ability to fail. It sucks that it costed you a lot. At my business, if we screw up bring it back and we'll fix it! Btw, I have not had any issues with my transmission. Alan, knows these things like the back of his hand.

Chris
 
I do understand that i was taking a chance being so far away,But when i waited for a month after alan was paid in full,and he had me chasing my tail and paying other people to look for things that were clearly were not there that keeps adding up and up and up.NOW had i been told just send it back and let me have a look in a reasonable amount of time,But that is not how it was working,it was everything,ecu,tps,sent it in for scans,speed sensor,wiring harness,everything checked out,but even then i was told it was electrical.Meanwhile the car is still down.Believe me i have to do warranty work on occasion it sucks,but people will only take so much till they have to make a decision to resolve the problem.Again this was simply not happening it was anything but the work done,that was proven as to why it failed.I would be doing an injustice to just keep my mouth shut and not tell my experience.All i can do is put it out there anyone can make their own choice.And i never questioned alans experience,that why i used him despite him being higher than anyone local.And just to add i did tell alan that i was on a budget,i told him i wanted a setup for a stock car, daily driver, 40 yr old woman that does not race or anything.Whatever he told me i would have gone with,I did not realize i was cheaping out at all.After all it is for my girlfriend and het 8 year old daughter and i surely did not want to cheap out when it comes to them for sure.
Update over 800 miles and no issues with the new build.No issues
 
After reading alans reply completely to the end,first i was never offered to bring the car to him.AT ALL and really if i had been offered that, how can you justify shipping a car around 900 miles and pay that cost,not feasible.Second i was never told to bypass the radiator with an aftermarket cooler,because if i had, i would have told him that it has a nearly brand new griffin radiator with less than 3,000.00 miles.And i did flush it out before the install.Probably thinking of someone else with the same problem because it was not me.
 
I've been ignoring this load of BS and lies for a while, I didn't even bother to skim it until today knowing it was a waste of my time. I will say this I have never ever denied anyone that if they bring me the car I will help them fix the issue. If the mistake is on my end I will even eat the cost. It's happened before I am not perfect but I still don't see any problem on my end with this one. I stressed the issue of bringing me the car on numerous occasions, you saying I didn't is a blatant lie and everyone who has ever dealt with me knows that. I would have even fixed the transmission if you had shipped it to me. yes I will refuse to cover shipping costs and there is no way I am paying another shop to fix it. I was never asked to provide any warranty service. I was demanded to give money back and nothing more. For all I know you took the original transmission to aamco had them fix it and sold the one I sent you. I am still dealing with visa and paypal over the chargeback, I still haven't received my parts back either. I am ignoring the emails cursing me out they aren't worth my time to reply.
Alan
 
I would suggest staying away from alan,as of today he charged my checking account 800.00 and overdrew my account,this was an unauthorized charge.Yes i did say i was going to send the parts they are in a box ready to ship,but i have been out of town working for three weeks,and honestly i was in no hurry to send them.He certainly was not in a hurry to get my so called rebuild to me took right at thirty days to get and lasted three.This person lives in a dream world,and is a thief.I now have to change my credit card because he has free reign to charge whatever he wants.be very cautious of him to say the least.
 
And also there was no mention of bringing the car,i live 1,000 miles away with a car with a burned up transmission.That would not even be a consideration.What a freakin joke this guy is,and a credit card thief as well.And i am also where wondering where aamco even comes into anything at all,that part is kinda funny.
 
We discussed bringing the car many many times, besides the point you made no attempt to even try to get me to fix the transmission you messed up. You can't just take it to another transmission shop and tell someone they owe you money that is not how it works. I used aamco as a generic term for a transmission shop. When the original agreement was made you agreed to return me my parts, you even said it in email and I think if I look through this thread I will find it again. The 800 is a core charge you agreed upon initially. I told you I waive the charges for 30 days unless other arrangements are made. The same thing I tell everyone on cores. Those parts are not easy to acquire I would rather have my parts back so send me my parts for a refund as you originally agreed upon.
Or continue cursing me out in email and we will fight it out with the credit card companies.
I WOULD RATHER HAVE MY PARTS.
Alan
 
Ok again there was never any talk about bringing the car in,as that was not an feasible option.The end result of the work speaks for itself 60 miles at best for 1750.00,rust and dirt in transmission is not acceptable under any circumstances.I also have been contacted by others that have had the same exact,exact issues that i have but are leary of coming forward due to the harrasment that will follow.And i am finding out the fraudulent charges as well.For the record i was never even sent any receipt ar documentation that stated anything about being able to go into your account at anytime and just take money out,nor was i told verbaly about some sort of deadline.Its just payback for speaking up and standing up for what is right.The parts were shipped when i got back into town,now i am again dealing with my bank over this.This has been a complete nightmare.And let it be understood i only have a fraud case for aprox 900.00 of the original cost,i never intended to try to get all of my money back due to me wanting a second opinion on what was going on.I was trying to be fair.So in no way should it be said that i ever asked for all of my money back.So as i tally all that this has cost me im at at around 4,600.00 its sad.
 
So besides saying give me money, give me money what attempts did you make to give me a chance to correct the problem? I also noticed that you made no mention that you did get your refund as promised once you sent me my parts, that you never would have sent me if you didn't have a financial reason to do so.
Make me out to be the aggressor and harrassor all you want but I bet you can not find one person who will say I never offered to help them if the car came to me, I told you the very same thing but with you anything not in writing is ignored. Just like the agreement to return the parts.
At this point I don't believe a word you say, I spent hours on the phone with you before and after the sale going over all this stuff repeatedly. When it comes to you trying to make me look bad for not giving you a free transmission you will say anything.
Alan
 
Again lets be clear here,i did not get a free transmission,i asked my bank to dispute 900.or so dollars i really cant remember but it was no more than 950.00.I paid 1,750.00.I got less than a weeks service out of the rebuild,around 60 miles.I am not trying to get anything for free,but i would like to get a quality product for what i am paying for.I never intended for it to be a total loss on the your end,due to me having to have the car running in a reasonable amount of time.And me deciding to get a second and third opinion as to what was going wrong.I sir am the one that have taken the most serious hit here.Quality rebuild and torque converter=1,550.00.transmission fluid = around 200.00,second opinion and checking trouble codes = 75.00,tow truck charges = 150.00,labor to install transmission twice i guess that matters as to what your time is worth,amount still paid on 60 mile service transmission=800.00,overdraft charges on my account due to me not expecting a 800.00 unauthorized charge = 105.00 and i was lucky there i went to pay a bill and my card and was rejected and that threw up a red flag,Thank god for that, or overdraft charges would have been bad,I sadly,live on a budget and just dont have money like that laying around.Waiting to be withdrawn without knowing about it.Soooo we are done here i hope
 
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