bill said:
had joel do a tach and speedo for me ONCE. the speedo has worked perfect for 30,000 miles but the tach had a wavering needle from day one, sent it back for a check up and was returned with nothing found wrong. it still wavered till it got so bad I removed the cable. that is the last time he will see my money.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
I still have the Speedo off a 68 Triumph restoration I did about 13-14 years ago,, I got just under 500 miles on it (an important milestone for break in) and it got intermittant then quit,, We found the drive part the cable went into in the back of the speedo had wallered out, a local guy with more experience than me suggested trying a longer cable, we went thru some of his stock and found one with a longer squared end,, jammed it in there and got another 75 miles before it quit,, I swapped out the instrument with another off the shelf from another project, In the same time frame of a few months had problems with another set for a 1967 BSA twin, both the tach and speedo were acting up, jumpy, and the tach kept disassy it self,, the screw holes holding it together were not so good, and the Bezel and lens leaked, I tried to send them all back, no luck, I ended up eating the cost which was significant to me at least.
In my own experience I had customers who might or do badmouth me., I always tried to do the right thing, but it isnt always possible to have a satisfactory outcome. I tend to not bad mouth dealers or other shops unless i really feel they deserve it. Its possible that Mr Levine is one of the best out there, and has a low percentage of unhappy customers related to the general cranky and dysfunctional people he deals with in this business. (and there is a LOT of them) but I simply couldnt afford being self employed to suffer those kind of loss's.
I had a similar experience with Buchanons spoke and wheel shop in the same time frame,, several bad orders, wrong parts supplied, surly customer service, and the final straw was $300 or $400 in overcharges, So i stopped using them, it cost me dearly when I was trying to keep my head above water. I generally buy most all my spokes and rims from Walridge Motors in Canada. Always went the extra mile for me even when the mistake was my own amd excellent customer service. A few years back (About 8 now) I was selling some wheels on ebay and some of them were mysterys to me. I started getting very helpful emails from a ebay person and were exceedingly helpful in ID'ing the wheels and assys, and gave me great advice, in further emails it turned out to be the son of the Buchanons owner. I forget his name, but I did relate some of my past issues with their company and explained my issues. He was very gracious about it, and was truly apologetic and urged me to give them another chance.
He explained its often difficult when you have employees respresenting your business to get 100% from them and a bad employee can ruin a companys reputation. I totally get that and understand that. and my point here is before badmouthing a service and or shop to try and keep that in mind that you may in fact be dealing with a rogue employee that doesnt represent the company in general.
Try and work thru your problems and give the shop owner the opportunity to correct the situation.
I get annoyed with people on forums and the internet who like to pile on and trash someone without the whole story, and I see it a lot so maybe im guilty here too, but when a situation is truly over the line I think people really benefit from the sharing of info, but I see it get out of hand a lot, there is the old adage that a satisfied customer generally relates the positive to 1 or 2 people but the angry customer tells 7 to 10 people. I wonder with the internet how that pencils out now days?
