Maybe this will help alleviate some of my anxiety…
So today I get to work on a customers car, 2g gsx. kid brought it to me b/c it was making a weird noise and didnt have power over 4g. He said he rebuilt the whole thing from top to bottom after it blew up once before. It smoked the vavles out of the head b/c the tbelt shed its teeth, then after that it was fixed b/c it spun a bearing.
So i have this fresh 1000mi motor brought to me, making a timing belt buzz/slap kinda noise, no one can figure it out supposedly. So, using the mighty jtech muscles i have, i started looking at it.
Nothing came up visually, so i figured id take it for a ride and see how it acted. The noise sounded pretty much like a growling tbelt cover which a lot of them do. Power though was fine, ran really good, no loss of power or anything.
About 3/4 around my test-drive loop i have, driving 45-50 on rt8 north, car just shuts off… boom dead. Get it pulled over, cranks like the belt broke. FANTASTIC.
Tow it back to the shop, find the teeth are mostly shreaded off, but the belt is still tight. Got the kid out to check it out, he’s like “do you think it bent vavles?”. I’m like yeah, it probably did. He looks at it for a second then says “i’m not paying for a thing.” i’m like great… He starts saying he brought it there running, now it doesnt run… saying “you blew it up”, whatever “you did” screwed it up. Now im a nice guy, but business is business. I start asking him about what he did when he put the motor together, did he rotate the tensioner in the correct direction, etc. …this is ontop of the fact that it did the same exact thing when he bought it. sheesh…
so, im tearing it apart to see what happened now. Hopefully i wont have to go to court. I’m sure he put it together wrong for something like this to happen being so fresh. I wasnt railing the piss out of it, but even if i was it should still stay together…
o the joys of sole proprietorship.
Welcome to the world of owning your own business… this certainly will not be the last time this happens either… in the kids eyes, it ran fine… you drove it, im sure he assumes you beat on it, it broke… its your fault…
Hopefully you don’t end up in court… thats no fun… maybe quit working on DSM’s?
Hope it all works out for you… you need to draw up a form for a person to sign on a performance car that if you test drive… any mechanical problems that happen during the drive… you are not responsible…