OK, quick update on the progress, or lack thereof, for those who have asked or are interested. It seems that the person who I have been dealing with is one of the founders of the company that manufactured the block, but is no longer an owner, but instead now an "employee" The company was sold some time ago, and last week I was finally able to make contact with the true owner of the company. He was certainly more forthcoming than the previously represented "owner" (really just an employee). On of the first things he did was to give me all of his contact numbers and email address, so I am now done with getting the runaround from his rep. I deal with him only from this point on. I have already heard from him numerous times in the past week or so, significantly more than I heard from his rep in the past two months. The owner was disturbed to say the least at all that I told him regarding the difficulties in reaching his representative, the lack of action taken to remedy the problem, as well as the rep passing himself off as an owner. I told him some of the remedies that the rep has offered me, and he was less than thrilled. He claims that his rep was in no way authorized to make me these offers of remedy, in which case my reply was that I have no way of knowing what his rep is authorized to say, that is an internal problem between him and his rep.
The bottom line is, the pick up tag for my defective block was issued one day after I spoke with the owner. I have been attempting to get this block picked up for almost two months through his rep to no avail, so that the fact that we finally got a pickup tag issued after only one phone call in and of itself is progress. I left off with the owner that he would look at the block and we would discuss remedies than. This seems reasonable to me. He seems to have no issue with believing that the block is defective, he only wants to see it for himself, which seems reasonable to me. One thing he mentioned was the possibility of sleeving this block. I have no interest in sleeving this block, as it's a brand new block and I paid full price for it. Every cylinder in it is bad showing significant porosity spots in each of them, and sleeving every cylinder in the block holds no interest to me. We'll see where it goes from here, it's still a disaster but at least we seem to be moving forward. To where, I don't know!
