5
UPDATE - the owners and shop manager have gone to impressive lengths to help "make this right" but there's honestly nothing that can be done to change what happened. I have, however, changed my star rating to reflect how impressed I am that they have made attempts to make things right. I do believe that they care about their customers and customer satisfaction is incredibly important to them. What follows is the original review that I posted on discovering that proper torquing procedures were not done on my intake manifold. === I needed to find a place to perform a walnut blast to clean the valves on my daughter's 2008 Mini Cooper S. The car only has about 63k miles on it but it was running rough and had some of the symptoms of carbon buildup. I've not had a walnut blast here in Texas so all of my experience is from the Philadelphia part of the country. The most I've spent on a walnut blast has been $350 and that was a price that seemed to be the baseline at the places that I called in Houston. I chose to take the Cooper to ABR in Spring even though I was told that the price range was going to be $350-$425. It needed to be done and ABR was close to my house. The night before, I changed the throttle body which requires the removal of all of the same parts and hoses that would need to be moved to perform the walnut blast. I remember thinking that the mechanic that performed this procedure was going to have an easy time of it because all of the difficult to remove hoses and bolts were recently taken off, cleaned and properly replaced the night before. (I made his job much, much easier!) Because I am fairly meticulous, I replaced all 5 intake manifold bolts, properly torqued all five of them and triple checked all of the connections, bolts and wire clips. When I picked up the Mini after the service, I was told that they underestimated the time that it would take to blast the valves. It had taken the mechanic much longer and because of that, they needed to charge more than they estimated. I wasn't overly sympathetic but I wanted to be as fair as possible. I agreed to pay them the top level price of $425 plus a charge for new intake manifold gaskets (I had told them that I had worked on the intake manifold the night before but they replaced (allegedly) the gaskets anyway.) I was then told that, from now on, it was going to cost $550 for my other two Mini Coopers if I wanted them to perform this same service on them. I had already decided to try to find someone else. Tonight, when I was checking the condition of the spark plugs, I happened to notice that one of the 5 intake manifold nuts was missing! They didn't put it back on after the walnut blast. I was stunned! It was one of the easiest nuts to replace and it was obviously missing! It took me all of 10 minutes to find a matching nut in my mountain of Mini Cooper parts in my garage, remove all the parts that were in the way and properly replace/tighten the nut. I had hoped that I was going to be able to refer my Mini Cooper friends to a place that they could trust to perform this rather important service at a reasonable cost by mechanics that can be trusted. Unfortunately, I can't recommend ABR in Spring to anyone that cares about their cars and/or quality service. {ok - this last part seems a bit harsh in hindsight. It's clear that ABR has done and will do a great job for almost all of their customers. I imagine the ratio is much higher here than most places- so that's a positive!}
Thanks, Brian- we appreciate you letting us try to rectify the situation as best as possible :)
- ABR Houston