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Originally Posted by dlotz
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Are you serious? A bumper falling off has nothing to do with an oil chage and is a pretty bad example. At least here valves, guides, seats and heads ar all in the same family!
And as far as not accepting a refund, would you pay $2000 for a set of heads, additional $300 for additional work from the same seller to fix the heads, another $135 in shipping for a total of close to $2500 and then be happy with a $2000 refund and then pay an additional $70 to ship the parts back for your refund?
Hopefully you're one of the engineers at Ford that knew the correct end of the screwdriver. I would hate for you to say that about yourself being an engineer for Ford and all. |
Dlotz – Although my analogy seems farfetched it is not too far from what happened to my father. My father ran a repair and state inspection station in the State of Pennsylvania. He did a brake job on a car for one of his good customers. 6 months later the customer sold the car. Then the lawsuit came for a bumper that supposedly “fell off the car” from the new customer. This new customer showed up at my dad’s shop with a picture of the bumper that had been unbolted from the car (old GM car, I think a Chevelle that has bumper bolts through the bumper). This guy didn’t even show up with the car, just pictures and was demanding my dad pay him some outrageous amount of money or he was going to turn him into the state police. My dad told him he wasn’t going to pay, it was obvious fraud and to get out of the shop.
This wacko then sued my dad and the previous owner which was eventually thrown out of court. Even the judge who looked at the pictures recognized it as fraud. Problem is that my dad endured this BS for 6+ months of phone harassment and the previous owner of the car had a heart attack and died the night before the trial. Turns out this guy had a long standing history of this kind of stuff and worked his way through many repair shops in the Pittsburgh area pulling this crap. I was about 10 years old at the time and remember this vividly.
My dad ran an old fashion repair shop, no advertising, all word of mouth, and was one of the best and most trusted mechanics in the Pittsburgh area. Unfortunately that didn’t stop people from complaining that their brakes were squeaking after you did an
oil change or a host of other things. It was one of the reasons that my dad didn’t want to expand his business and worked off word of mouth to keep his customers to people who he had known personally. Ultimately as society changed through the 80’s and 90’s and everyone had a lawyer on speed dial he decided it just wasn’t worth it anymore. Until you are in the business yourself, it is your livelihood, your reputation, and everything you live and breathe for it is hard to imagine what the small business owner like Keith Craft has to endure on a day-to-day basis. This is probably why after 30 years for him he is seriously thinking of giving up the job that most likely started as a hobby and progressed into a thriving business, one that has supported his family over the years but also at the sacrifice of missing his kids baseball games from time to time so he could finish an engine for a guy 1500 miles away.
So yea……..I grew up knowing the business end of a screw driver, changing tires when I was 5 years old, engine swaps by the time I was 12, and had a father that told me he would kick my ass if I ended up being a mechanic like him and pushed me to make more of my life and get my engineering degree. Unfortunately I worked with too many engineers (a good many of them foreign) who had Masters and PHD’s in engineering and they couldn’t change a tire or their sparkplugs if their life depended on it.
As for the heads and what you paid for in your mind vs. what you got is a matter of perception. Had Keith advertised them as “New Old Stock”, perfect condition, just as they left the factory then you might have a 100% solid argument. Instead I believe that he advertised them (per somewhere in your post) that they were “In great condition”. The difference in perception of you believing you were getting NOS factory parts for “In Great Condition” vs. Keith’s opinion that these 40+ year old heads were in “Great Condition” is where the problem lies.
This is probably one of the reasons that Keith said **** it, just send me the heads and I’ll send you your $2K back. And I’m sure he wasn’t going to eat the extra $300 plus shipping out of pure principle since you should have had a more reasonable expectation of what you were buying for $2000, knowing that you were not buying brand new in the box parts that have been just gathering dust for 40+ years.
Stay at work until 9:00pm tonight, miss your kids baseball game and tucking them in bed for the night all for the love of your company and maybe it will make sense. But until you walk a mile in his shoes you’ll never understand why.