There are charlatans and there are outright crooks. I friend here in Germany with a 65 coupe has had his car in several shops here for various work. Like most German car guys he does not turn his own wrenches and he lives far enough from me I can' always jump in to help.....
Recently a shop replaced his front fenders, doors, a good portion of the floor and did a Shelby drop he did not ask for. When he got the car back it looked prettu good but since he has 15 tires on the car and they did not roll the fenders he has scraping problems. They said they would fix it but promptly closed shop, turned out they had legal problems from other customers. Now he didn't want to have the fenders fixed and then repainted so we just returned the UCAs to the original position. Car was not running well so he took it to one of the big name shops over here for an inspection of needed work. I won't list it all but here are three items.
Proposed installing new head gaskets, said two cylinders had weak compression. I checked it with my gauges and he was right about 145 PSI on all cylinders.
They wanted to replace his long tube headers with cast iron OEM manifolds, did not provide reason. When I looked over the engine from below I could see the headers were leaking at the heads and there were quite an assortment of various header bolts. We got a Remflex gasket and stage 8 bolts, put them in and the car runs and sounds better.
Wanted to sell him new door hinges because his doors hung low. When I looked at the hinges you could see where the paint was scraped since the hinges were not properly tightened so I helped him reposition the doors using the old floor jack technique.
Of course the shop proposing this work sells everything that proposed and were set to make bit money.
Recently a shop replaced his front fenders, doors, a good portion of the floor and did a Shelby drop he did not ask for. When he got the car back it looked prettu good but since he has 15 tires on the car and they did not roll the fenders he has scraping problems. They said they would fix it but promptly closed shop, turned out they had legal problems from other customers. Now he didn't want to have the fenders fixed and then repainted so we just returned the UCAs to the original position. Car was not running well so he took it to one of the big name shops over here for an inspection of needed work. I won't list it all but here are three items.
Proposed installing new head gaskets, said two cylinders had weak compression. I checked it with my gauges and he was right about 145 PSI on all cylinders.
They wanted to replace his long tube headers with cast iron OEM manifolds, did not provide reason. When I looked over the engine from below I could see the headers were leaking at the heads and there were quite an assortment of various header bolts. We got a Remflex gasket and stage 8 bolts, put them in and the car runs and sounds better.
Wanted to sell him new door hinges because his doors hung low. When I looked at the hinges you could see where the paint was scraped since the hinges were not properly tightened so I helped him reposition the doors using the old floor jack technique.
Of course the shop proposing this work sells everything that proposed and were set to make bit money.
