Bad Mechanics Leave a Lasting Legacy — The Carmudgeon Show Jason Cammisa & Derek Tam-Scott — Ep 158

The Carmudgeon Show

Jason just solved a nagging problem on his car that he paid to have fixed 26 years ago. Turns out, the mechanic charged him for a repair he didn't make.

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Click here to join the Hagerty Driver's Club: https://bit.ly/Join-HDC-Cammisa-Rev

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Jason just solved a nagging problem on his car that he paid to have fixed 26 years ago. Turns out, the mechanic charged him for a repair he didn't make.

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Click here to join the Hagerty Driver's Club: https://bit.ly/Join-HDC-Cammisa-Rev

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It's well known that Jason Cammisa's Volkswagen Scirocco 16V is his favorite car. What's not so well-known is that he hit a curb while driving it back in the late 1990s, and bent a control arm.

After saving for over a year, he finally had the money to replace the arm, and commissioned a local repair shop to perform the work. The Scirocco came back from the alignment shop with bad news: Installing the new control arm didn't put there wheel back where it belonged. The Scirocco's frame was bent.

After living with the guilt of having damaged his favorite toy for more than a quarter-century, Jason finally got up the gumption (and money) to have the car's frame straightened.

The frame shop had some interesting news: there was nothing wrong with the car — the control arm was merely bent.

Turns out the shop that charged Young Jason to replace the arm... didn't. And last week, Jason finally replaced it himself, solving a decades-long alignment issue.

This made Jason think about his first three bad experiences as a young man with a VW shop (who tried to charge him near as much in diagnostics than he'd paid for the whole car for a simple bad ground wire) a VW dealer who disconnected his headlights and tried to extort him out of hundreds... and the aforementioned shop — all of whom are responsible for encouraging Jason to do all the work on his cars himself.

Derek has a similar story about a local mechanic to tried to charge him $4500 for a simple ignition coil.

Fun times.

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