dude because of things like this im scared to have any shop do anything on my car not saying that it was anybodies fault but too many stories like this make me want to learn and do it myself maybe cheaper even if i do fuck it up the first time
The build sheet didnt say he paid for 4.130 pistons. It said it was finished honed to 4.130 .005 for clearance. Guy has more money than smarts. I might be upset about the lifters but im wondering why he didnt take it back to cartek unless he has already been that route and they wouldnt help him.
I read Carteks post on this matter also. Is there more to this story then what's being said in the video?
Yes.
This is Cartek's (100% accurate and truthful) account of how all of these events actually transpired:
I am here to tell our side of the story. The reason for the delay is that we didn't want to comment on a public forum until we had discussed the matter with our attorneys.
The story starts off with how we ended up with this customer. He came in after he had a cam package installed by Lingenfelter on his Z06 and it dropped a valve after some time of use and threw the rod out the side of the block destroying everything including his starter, damaging his engine harness, etc. Nothing was reusable. This is one of the reasons the bill was so high. He tried contacting them to see if there was any type of warranty and see what they could do for him and they told him there was nothing that they would do for him. Lingenfelter is a reputable and well known shop and by no means has done anything wrong here.
So we took in the job and built the first engine which made 570+ RWHP and there was plenty of video of him racing cars that had claimed higher horsepower figures yet he was still winning. The warranty in the bill was from a previous company when Cartek was co-owned by Julio and Dave. After Julio bought out Dave the company was changed. Dave had made some business decisions that we did not want to haunt us.
The warranty states "normal wear and tear". On that original engine that he states had failed, he conveniently forgot to mention that it failed when he was at a track day event and took the oil temperature above 290 degrees with non-synthetic oil by his own admission. Immediately following this he had low oil pressure. He wanted the engine warrantied, we told him no that it is not under warranty since we are no longer the same company and that even if we were still the same company, you damaged the engine while racing and the damage was due to your own negligence on top of that.
He was very upset and up to that point had been a good customer so after some careful thought and truly believing that he was decent guy, we'd decided that we should take care of him....clearly "a bad business decision".
We said we would help thinking that it would be just a simple rebuild. Well upon dis-assembly we saw that the block was junk, needed a new crank (the snout was bent... we had questions as to how that happened... we know it didn't leave that way), pistons, etc. Since we had already committed to fixing his problem for him we stood by our word and at no charge built him a new engine... a second engine. We selected smaller 4.125 pistons to give the engine another service life and to add rigidity to the engine. The lifters were also junk since they had so much bearing debris go through them, we replaced the Morels with Comp R lifters which are lighter for the road racing that he wanted to do. This was no longer a warranty build, but a gift to help him get back out, so we changed a couple of things to make things better while we were at it. The second motor ran just as well as the first one and made the same power.
After a few days we get a call that the car had died and would no longer run after running like crap. So he brings in the car and we see that there is an electrical problem. The electrical problem was related to damage to the engine harness not realized in the very first engine failure before it came to our shop. He is complaining that he wants his car back ASAP and that it had been here for 2 months (please note, one really shouldn't be complaining since they just got a free engine), so Julio spends the entire night diagnosing and along with the help of GM schematics and wire probing gets the problem narrowed down to a ground on the harness. This ground ties into a few sensors including the O2 sensors. So the O2 sensors were malfunctioning and the car had "learned out" the tune causing the car to run real rich and wash out the rings. The customer comes in the next day, everything is fine, and he starts complaining about the bill we submitted to him for repairing the harness that, keep in mind, was damaged before the car even came to us. The harness was not broken because of us or anything that we had done in the past so it was a billable item. He becomes very irate, Julio tells him to take his car and just leave and of course this customer has now skipped out on the bill.
The customer while getting his car corner weighted at another shop is talked into getting his car dyno'd since it had been running pretty bad, and expectedly so. He puts the car up and does a pull and sees that the car dyno'd 50 RWHP less. After that the customer contacted us quite upset about what was going on... he questioned the integrity of our shop and threatened to take the engine apart. At this point we were pretty disgusted with this whole transaction. He never gave us a chance to look at it. He now goes to a fourth shop and has yet another dyno pull done and the car dyno'd low again. So he had it retuned back up to 54X RWHP (so obviously the previous tune was gone and it didn't fully recover probably due to the rings being washed out). Now that he retuned it, even if there was a warranty (and as stated above, there was none at all), he has now clearly voided it anyway with that retune.
He posts up his findings in an unfair light and blasts us on the internet. So at this point why would we ever do anything for this obviously ungrateful person ever again.
He's then convinced that his low power is the result of too small a cam being selected. The cam he had in there made the power and was not huge since he wanted a road race cam and those cams are typically milder to allow the valvetrain to live longer. So he lets the other shop change out the cam for some larger selection... once again voiding any type of warranty even if there was one to begin with, but it doesn't matter because there wasn't any. After the new cam he dyno'd something like 16 RWHP more from what we'd heard and the car is now not going as fast as it previously had... I guess that new cam and tune didn't work out too well.
Finally the engine had a ticking noise, who knows how that new camshaft was set up??? He basically had now also destroyed his second engine. According to the video the lifter was damaged... well that is probably due to an improper cam selection for his application.
So the customer now calls me to ask for replacement parts for what he didn't receive. He mentions the smaller pistons (.005" smaller = less than 1 cubic inch) and wants new pistons, he also mentions the lifters and wants new Morels. I told him that he was entitled to nothing and that the parts he received were just as good (the Comp R lifters he received were the higher Comp lifter part# and are lighter than the Morels and are far better for his valvetrain with the cam we had selected). On the phone the customer says "if you want this to go away, you should give me what I want.", I said to that "is this a threat?" to which he replied "uh, huh".
That's called EXTORTION and our lawyers are quite familiar with how to handle that.
There are lots of people that know what we stand for and also know that we truly do stand behind our work. We are not known for any type of questionable or shady practices.
I suppose you simply can't keep everyone happy.
We believe that we have handled this better than most and have done everything humanly possible to make the situation right, actually we went above and beyond what is expected.
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LE2 H/C/I, Speedinc tuned, UMI, BMR, Dana S60, blah blah blah.......
2nd place EX NA at LTXshootout
No matter what amount of money you put into a car, if you do not properly maintain the vehicle in the ways that you should and start adding different parts then what the engine was originally built or designed for, then you run the risk of shit breaking or failing. Granted I am not saying I am on eithers side, but there are things that are avoidable when researched or done correctly.
Its funny about when they said he races the car LOL. What do you think he or anyone else is buying it for to look at it? I know im gonna buy a 26k motor and put it in my vette and never get on it or race it
No need for 10 new threads about this every day. Don't jump to conclusions when you don't have all of the facts. There are always three sides to every story like this: the shop's, the customer's, and the truth.
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Nice Job Cartek... NOT 
