Way to run a bad business (long)

Well that sounds reasonable to me.
Also, personally I think you would have been much better off if you had visited the "TECHNICAL" forum. It has saved me a ton of money in the past. Most shops don't understand Supercoupes and try their best to rush you out of the shop with something like you ended up with. I don't see how one can just assume that you have blown head gaskets if there isn't water in the oil and/or puffy white smoke boiling from your tailpipes. You could have needed something as simple as a radiator cap. A list of things that could be wrong include in no certain order include:

Radiator cap
Radiator
Water pump
Thermostat
Heater core

Head Gaskets
 
Also.....

On a side note the stock radiators in these cars are real crap after ten years or so!:rolleyes: I hear that they can't always be "flushed" due to a breakdown of the internal cores. They turn to mush and are almost impossible to repair in some cases.

Good Luck!

Dirtybird91

Frank:cool:
 
Thats true but it would have been wasted money either way. Testing for leaking HG's is easy and quick. They probably thought you would much rather know whats really wrong with you car than just bolting on a part that they knew was'nt the problem.
Kind of a double edged sword for them really, damned if they do and damned if they dont. Bad news is never really accepted very well.
 
Dirtybird, he did visit the tech forum. I told him it was more than likely the t-stat. Xsith, make no mistake, Im not baggin on you and I understand how it can be frustrating. I have had to deal with several people who felt like they got screwed at the shop. Any time I had an additional cost or more stuff the car needed I had to call them. I screwed up one day and went to lunch with an estimate of one cv shaft on my desk. The car needed two. They called me at lunch and asked. I told them it was on my desk. My buddy bid it at half of the cost. She was pissed and no one knew why. I had to go back and readjust some stuff to make it like a grand less. It was my fault and my boss kicked @$$ and we ended up splittin the cost with her. The point is, because of the lack of communication, it was a bad deal and she was not happy.
 
Strangely enough....

My 1994 SC was doing the exact same thing as his was two days ago. While the car was just sitting there idling it would get so hot that the red light in the dash would come on. The car was fine while it was moving.
My brother and I usually work on our own cars, so yesterday we went to work on it. We don't just try to isolate the problem when our cars break, we usually try to fix/replace everything possible because these cars are O L D!!!

We replaced my:

Water Pump, Thermostat, and radiator cap.

Isolating the issue is the same as putting on a bandaid in this sort of case. The issue is only temporarily resolved.

The car runs fine now and does not overheat. I may have a water pump laying around with absolutely nothing wrong with it. Who the hell knows! One thing is sure..... I will not have to worry about any of these issues for a few more years. In my opinion this was $100.00 well invested.
;)
Frank:cool:
 
O/T , how hard is a water pump to replace in an SC? might have to help a buddy out locally. Looks like it is easy to access....lots of belts though:cool:
 
hmmmm.........

SC UL8R1990 said:
O/T , how hard is a water pump to replace in an SC? might have to help a buddy out locally. Looks like it is easy to access....lots of belts though:cool:

I have done a lot tougher jobs Walter, but the Power Sterring pump is a "Bee Itch" without a power tool.:p

Frank
 
chris walker

I'm the guy with the probe. You are right about me not knowing what was wrong with my car. Thats why I took it to the dealer, to get new cv joints and to get the wierd noises diagnosed in my motor. I signed an authorization giving them the authority to complete the suspension work and do whatever they could to determine what the noises were, up to $600 total. How did they not do me wrong? They wanted me to pay for repairs that I didn't authorize. They were the ones who didn't know what was going on if they were stupid enough to remove the engine from my car without even contacting me and without my authorization. The big picture seems to be many people have had problems with many shops, and it is not always the customers fault.

Brandon

1994 5-speed
 
I was not clear on my end on that. Yours is a case where the shop was in the wrong from what I can tell. I am trying to say that the reason they did not want to do the repair on the t-stat is because there was no problem with it. Had they repaired it then they would have charged for a REPAIR when in fact the problem was in the head gasket. Im sure I have a story for, or an answer for because I also wrote service for a while. Im not trying to be an @$$ but from the shops legal point of view its hard to say what they did is wrong. Its not that I dont feel for the guy but I dont think he has a case. You have to prove with out a reasonable doubt that the shop acted negligently (sp, im drunk} towards him and i Domt think thye did in this case.
 
On the opposite side of the coin however, I once took my car (pre-sccoa) to a Midas because the idle suddenly jumped to 1800 rpms on start-up and would not go down from there at all. All I had to do was take my foot off the brake and I could accelerate up to 45 mph without touching the gas pedal!:eek:

At the time I didn't know an IAC from a CAI. They had it for three days and the tech looked at everything he could think of on my mysterious and bewildering engine.:confused: He even ordered a new maf/sensor to see if that would correct it but to no avail. Finally they had to give the car back to me after three days of working on it, in the exact same condition that I brought it in (they put back the old maf). Said they had bad news- I would have to take it to the dealer.

They didn't charge me a single cent for three days of searching for the solution! :cool: (turned out to be the IAC, and if I had know about the sccoa back then I probably could have found the cause in three minutes!)
 
Everybody blaming the shop in this should go work in a shop where they deal directly with customers.

This shops biggest mistake was in not having a stated policy that all cars get a diagnosis first, regardless of the customer request.

I used to work in a shop and when we first started we were pretty green. All of us from the owner/manager on down. For the first year or so we would do exactly what the customer wanted. They came in wanting a thermostat, we put in a thermostat. They wanted a battery despite the alternator not charging, we put in a battery. And so on.

It wasn't long before a pattern became painfully clear. Besides the fact that the customer was almost never right in their diagnosis we also got a lot of grief about the work they requested not fixing their car. As if it was our fault that they wanted a t-stat when the real problem was a clogged radiator. All too often once we touched a car for customer diagnosed work we became "married" to it. It was striking just how often that after doing a small customer requeste job the customer would return repeatedly for more and more work that ended up being given away free because the so-called customer would raise a big stink about how"it should've been fixed the first time" and the owner would roll over.

Eventually we instituted a policy in self-defense that all cars got a diagnosis regardless of the customers initial request. Talking to other shops finds that this sort of customer is pretty common.

All in all I don't think the shop that is the subject here could win either way. If they had installed the thermostat as requested they would've been vilified for doing unnecessary work since the car didn't need a thermostat to fix it's problem. Alternatively, by diagnosing the vehicle and determining the true cause of the concern they get vilified for not performing the requested work that was unnecessary. Lose-Lose situation.

This sort of thing is just one more reason why I'm glad I don't work on cars professionally anymore.
 
Collin,

I think you're being unreasonable. Filing a complaint with the attorney general's office because they did not install a part you asked them to, isn't going anywhere. They are more likely to get in trouble for installing something you asked for, if it wasn't needed.

I think they did you a favor by not taking advantage of you. In fact, $70 is a very cheap price for diagnosing head gaskets. Especially if they did a compression test or tested for exhaust gas in the coolant.

What if they would have called you and said..."We don't think there is anything wrong with the thermostat, because it is opening when it should. We think it may be a leaking headgasket and we will need to perform a compression test to confirm that's what the problem is."

Would you still insist they put the thermostat in and see if that fixes the problem ?

David
 
Not only that but the t-stat operates when the spring portion sits in the coolant heats up. It probably took them a while to figure it out. If they hooked you up like Dave suggested your complaint will go nowhere.

Dave hows the 5.0 comin?
 
David Neibert said:
Collin,

I think you're being unreasonable. Filing a complaint with the attorney general's office because they did not install a part you asked them to, isn't going anywhere. They are more likely to get in trouble for installing something you asked for, if it wasn't needed.

I think they did you a favor by not taking advantage of you. In fact, $70 is a very cheap price for diagnosing head gaskets. Especially if they did a compression test or tested for exhaust gas in the coolant.

What if they would have called you and said..."We don't think there is anything wrong with the thermostat, because it is opening when it should. We think it may be a leaking headgasket and we will need to perform a compression test to confirm that's what the problem is."

Would you still insist they put the thermostat in and see if that fixes the problem ?

David

I'm not sure exactly what test they used to get their answer. They did tell me that the test performed involved removing the radiator cap and putting some 'device' on it. Its called "pressure test coolant system" on the reciept.


David,
If they had called me and said they didn't think it's the thermostat because it's operating fine then I probably would've come back to SCCOA and searched or asked what else it could be. Or maybe I would've asked them to do some tests? Or maybe something else? The fact is, they didn't call me, or even find out for sure that the thermostat was in correct working order. Or at least they didn't tell me if they did. Generally, I'm not one to start "fusses" over things, but I feel that this fuss is a valid one.

There's always two sides to every unpleasant situation, so I don't expect everyone to agree with me. My opinion of how things went down, however, is still my opinion.
 
XsithX said:
I'm not sure exactly what test they used to get their answer. They did tell me that the test performed involved removing the radiator cap and putting some 'device' on it. Its called "pressure test coolant system" on the reciept.


David,
If they had called me and said they didn't think it's the thermostat because it's operating fine then I probably would've come back to SCCOA and searched or asked what else it could be. Or maybe I would've asked them to do some tests? Or maybe something else? The fact is, they didn't call me, or even find out for sure that the thermostat was in correct working order. Or at least they didn't tell me if they did. Generally, I'm not one to start "fusses" over things, but I feel that this fuss is a valid one.

There's always two sides to every unpleasant situation, so I don't expect everyone to agree with me. My opinion of how things went down, however, is still my opinion.

Collin when they did a pressure test on the cooling system that told them your HG's are blown and theres no 2 ways about it.
They did you a favor actualy because now you know whats wrong with your car and you can really get it fixed now.
I wanted to say your HG's were blown in my first post because your symptoms have been exactly whats happened to many of my cars down through the years. But I also know that there can be other ways a HG blows causing different symptoms, so I said nothing at that time.
But since they done that pressure test the discushion is over and you need to get on the HG's and fix them.:)
 
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