Kenny LaRowe
Saturday.
HUGE hats off to Daryl and his guys at Albany Speed Shop. Short story, they helped me in a huge way to fix a problem that ended up being of my own doing after I was the a$$hole that though they had not done the alignment correctly.
Long Story:
After finally finding the parts I needed for adjusting my rear camber, I needed a last minute alignment. Even though they were extremely busy, Daryl said they would definitely get to it if I could leave it with them for a couple days. That was perfectly fine with me because I really needed the alignment by tomorrow (Sunday). So I left it with them and they were able to get the alignment done. On my way home I noticed that the car was still violently pulling to either side after turning. So I figured that maybe the alignment wasn’t done properly and sent Daryl a message (couldn’t find the phone number at the time). He called me first thing this morning and asked me to bring it in because he wanted to make sure it was right. I brought it in and we put it back on the rack. Sure enough, the toe was completely off again. So they fixed it again and we took it for a ride. It was still pulling. So we brought it back and threw it up on the lift to see if something was loose. Finally we discovered that the spring perch was not turning properly and it was causing the spring to bind up which was essentially changing the alignment every time I turned the wheel. We figured it was the bearing had gone bad and I said that I would get it fixed sometime this week and we could redo the alignment again once I had it fixed. Nope, that didn’t work for him. He said that since it was already on the lift, we might as well fix it now so it was 100% when I left. After getting it apart we discovered that the bearing was non-existent and there was nothing allowing the perch to spin. Well Napa was closed but that wasn’t going to stop him. He called the manager / owner and told him it was an emergency. So the manager / owner of Napa made a special trip just to get me the parts I needed. The new parts arrived and Daryl along with another tech (can’t remember his name) both took time out of their day (they were long closed by this point) and helped me get the suspension working properly. Once it was fixed we did a quick rough alignment to make sure the toe was correct. I didn’t want to waste more of their time on a full alignment because both of the top hats had heavy wearing from the lack of the bearing and I will need to replace them… so there was no since doing a full alignment only to have to redo it so we just did the quick ‘racer’ method alignment with a couple tape measures and got the toe near perfect. Now she seems to be tracking almost perfect (top hats are still causing minimal binding) and I couldn’t be happier. Although I tried paying for the use of their lift and 2 techs, Daryl refused to take anything from me… even though the problem was 100% my fault and nothing that they did wrong. All he cared about was that the car was right when it left the shop and it is.
So once again, THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU Daryl for your help in getting this fixed and although you say no, I definitely owe you big time. I will definitely be sure to keep sending people your way!!!