Our first month as a service organization

Today marks the end of our first month offering repair service to the public.  Rand Ames, a very experienced auto technician, came to me at the end of January looking for a job.  My present tech, Tom Abbott, and I had talked about expanding into offering service, but this was the catalyst we needed.  Tom was hurt in a snow blower accident in December and is just now able to work part time as his hand heals.  I was starting to despair that we would have no cars ready for Spring sales.  With Randy we have the manpower and the experience to move forward rapidly, completing the work needed on my inventory of projects and offering the collector car community a much needed resource able to repair a wide variety of cars, including modern ones.

We've had a number of unremarkable small jobs this month, but also got into some interesting ones.  A 1985 Porsche Slant Nose Turbo (rare factory original) is our first.  The car needs much done, but we're constrained by the owner's budget to sealing up all the oil leaks.  A competitor told us he always tells his Porsche 911 customers with leak problems that he must rebuild the engine ($9K-$10K).  We're doing the job for $1600 as the engine is healthy - it just leaks. 

A VW Passat with the W8 engine came in for service.  The engine is a very rare narrow angle hemi V8 with 4 widely spaced overhead cams operating 4 valves per cylinder, with variable valve timing.  The valve timing adjustment mechanism was malfunctioning, causing rough running and emissions issues leading to state inspection failure (and would cause catalytic converter failure).  The official dealer quote to repair this malfunction was $9200 (can't imagine what they were going to do besides soaking the owner).  Randy spent 5 hours of his own time studying the problem, and then 5 hours doing the repair using a novel approach of his own invention.  The problem was solved for a cost under $500.

My '58 Alfa Giulietta finally came out of our body restoration shop and Tom spent most of his time preparing the suspension parts for paint and assembly.  Justin Raymer, soon to join us as another employee, did a beautiful job preparing the car.  He's now working on my Mk2 Jaguar sedan.