travismaser

Hey guys!
Whelp, I’m back! A lot of you know me from my Toyota 350z build that has been going on for quite a few months now. The build was something that I have been dreaming about for about 3 years now and I finally saved up enough cash to make that dream come true....well it turned into a nightmare VERY quick.
I guess I can start out by telling you guys how I met the guys out at shifted performance and why I went to them in the first place. I was on the supra forums researching what I would need to buy to get my project going, talking to different guys about motors, turbo's, tuning, etc....I got a lot of PM's from guys, giving me lots of good info about who to talk to and so on. Then I got a PM from a guy saying that he had a shop in NJ, and had been doing 2jz swap kits for RX7's for a little while now, he sent me some pictures of the cars and talked my ear off about everything he does and would offer over the kit I was going to buy (tech 2)...I was very sketchy at first but left him in the back of my mind...a year and a half later, he was still emailing me and sending pictures and so forth, sooo I decided to go out to the shop, look around and see about leaving my car there...
In late September 2011, I decided to take a ride out with a few friends and potentially drop the car off...got there, loved the few builds he showed me and the deal he was cutting me didn’t seem all that bad. He offered me a sponsorship that would include his kit, paint and wiring harness for free. A discounted labor rate of 4,000.00, and a safe place for my car for the winter. We discussed when the car would be done and what all I wanted on it. He told me that he wanted my car "to be a model of what kind of work he could REALLY do"...he wanted my car to be his company’s money maker in a way. He promised me a car that would be a reliable everyday driver with all the same qualities of a brand new car (A/C, Nav, all new gauges, reliable, all brand new parts, clips, wiring, the whole 9 yards) everything looked legit, Tony seemed professional, and I was happy when I left my 2006 350z there.
A few months went by and Tony seemed to be FLYING thru the build, I received pictures every day, a phone call every night giving me details of what all he had done that day, what he planned on doing and so forth…I was so excited to get the car back…we had talked about the car being done around Christmas time and most definitely done before the New Year….wellll that didn’t happen…this is where I started to get a little worried …BUT, when I brought it up to Tony he would simply say “Travis, I told you in the beginning, you can trust me..it’s going to be done and done the right way”…so I gave him a few more months…then March came and I was seeing little to no work being done, and when I did see work, it was not good work…like when he finally got it to run, he sent videos of it driving around at night so you could not see if it was blowing smoke or anything (I found out later that he had the APEXI Safc 2 wired in backwards and it was DUMPING fuel and running REALLY unsafely) he called one day and said he hooked the intercooler piping up and my turbo (that was on my VQ and ran just fine), blew up under only 2PSI…he couldn’t get it to run correctly, (we found out was because it was wired backwards)and it took him 3 weeks to mount my new GT4088R….Finally, I gave him a call and said I would be there in 2 weeks from that day…it would be a Friday and I was going to be taking the car…I could not have it sitting there any longer…he said ok…I felt 2 weeks was PLENTY of time to tune the car and have it ready for me to pick it up…3 DAYS BEFORE I WENT TO GET IT, I called and he STILL had not touched it…said he lost track of time….I simply said, ILL BEE THERE FRIDAY…sooo that Thursday night when I called him, it still was not running…he said it just needed tuned and it would be fine…so I took my tuner with me to Jersey. When myself and Josh from NSN Garage showed up on Friday morning we pulled up to me my car sitting in the front of the garage with the hood up, Tony standing in front of it…we got out and greeted each other then I said “let’s hear it run”…he immediately started saying “let’s check out the shop, look at this look at that…sooo after about 5 mins of that I said again, “let’s hear my car”…he couldn’t find the keys, so I had a set…tried to start it…NOTHING…he then said it was out of gas and that he had been having trouble keeping gas in it…the car held gas just fine when I dropped it off??? sooo we started pouring gas into the tank and to my surprise, it went in the filler and right out the bottom of the tank!!! (later found that he removed the fuel pump and never tightened the bolts holding the fuel pump basket down, he actually lost one of them and all the rest were less than hand tight)….we then began our 24 hr. tuning and fixing adventure…after hrs. of scratching our heads trying to figure out the fuel problem and the tuning issues, we found that the Safc2 had been wired in wrong, the alternator was bad, the alternator being bad drained my battery to the point that it would no longer hold a charge, the MAP sensor was bad, and my oil was flooded with gas….I bought new plugs, a new battery, fixed the gas leak and changed the oil…Josh got the Safc 2 to hold the car at about 14.5 A/F ratio and Tony replaced the alternator and map sensor. (this all happened between 7am Friday morning and midnight Friday night) we finally had the car ready for the trip home, running well…starting right up, driving up and down the street fine, back and forth to the gas station (about 3 miles)hit a little boost and the car never leaned out…things were good to go! I got into the car and turned on the radio to leave…NOTHING….he had removed all the wiring to the amps….sooo we were stuck there for ANOTHER hr.…Tony put all that back in and we then left for home…
On the way home we had to pull over to reattach my hood, because it almost came off…they had never tightened the hood down and my gauges all stopped working then would come on then stop and on and stop and on etc….and not to mention I had all the gauges wired into the dimmer switch so that at night they could be dimmed…tony rewired them into the radio so I had to put blue tape over most of them so I could see out the windshield…. Other than that, the car seemed to run fine the whole way home…got it home, put it in the garage so that we could go over it with a fine toothed comb the next day…
This is where it gets interesting…while we were there, we did not go over the car very well…we had one goal in mind and that was get it out of there…I never really looked at the paint (didn’t think I had to) never looked at anything except what was giving us problems….

Josh trying to figure out the wiring mess Shifted created


First thing we noticed after washing the car was all the body damage…a dent in the hood from where they were pushing on the front to latch it (kind of understandable but ehhh shouldn’t be there) my rear bumper was melted from where he was SOOOO pumped that he got the exhaust to sit so “tucked” against the body, numerous cracks in the front bumper, scratches on the fenders from not using fender covers and gouges in the rear passenger side bumper.




here looks like they messed up the CF and tried to repare it:

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-__- 2jz 350Z -__- NSN Garage

travismaser

….then we looked at the engine….we started looking at how he had ran everything for the turbo coolant lines because it was all a cluster right in front of the turbo so you couldn’t run an intake (had to fab up a weird ugly intake to drive around) soo after looking at all of that we noticed something odd!...both, the “IN” and “OUT” lines to the turbo were ran off the same water neck, RIGHT BESIDE EACHOTHER!! Now, I am no genius, BUT, how does that properly flow coolant to the turbo??? I look at it and think its kind of like sucking and blowing through a straw at the same time…after opening it up, OF COURSE, there is an air lock in there…the turbo wasn’t getting proper coolant!!!! (that would most likely be why y old turbo blew up…he was running it without in intercooler pipes attached and it was spooling like crazy with no back pressure…then when it finally did get a little boost, BOOM, bearings went out…)

After we found that, we kept looking….didn’t take long to find the A&N fittings were all loose (less than hand tight) on the oil catch can, there is no vacuum hooked to the catch can, AND the fittings from the catch can to the valve cover were cross threaded AND JB welded into the valve cover (one sides JB Weld didn’t hold up and you can pull it right out of the cover…)





NONE of the vacuum lines were hooked up to the Waste gate, the lines ran to the boost controller were just hanging under the dash and the one going to the BOV was VERY loose…
The radiator hose crossing in front of the cam gears was actually hitting the gears! Instead of shaving a half inch off the hose, he just rested it against the plastic valve cover, cover…


If you stood back, and lines the motor up with the center of the car you could see that it is actually sitting in there crooked (tough to see in pics and you can’t tell on first look…but once you see it, it stands out like a sore thumb) (after further looking into this, we have to cut and re-weld the trans mount to fix it…BUT, NSN Garage is going to rebuild the mounts for me so I have ZERO affiliation with Shifted…)


After noticing the motor was crooked, we looked at the intercooler and of course…it sits higher on one end than the other…minor details he should have had perfect…
We started noticing on the drive that if you do not down shift through every gear when you come to a stop, 1st and 2nd gear seem to just disappear…not real sure of why this is happening yet (if anyone has any ideas, please let me know)
I now have to refill the power steering fluid every day, it didn’t leak before I dropped it off.
when I was at Shifted I never noticed but the “ceramic coating” on my manifold was slowly burning off….by the time I got home, it was all burnt off…soo I called Tony and asked him about it and he came clean and said it was sprayed with high heat paint…. (I was not charged for ceramic coating BUT I was told it was done)

we started looking at the Polish job (which was supposed to be chrome in the first place) that I paid over $400 for and I am EXTREAMLY upset with how it looks…parts are not done well…some parts not even touched, scratches in it and it honestly doesn’t even look shiny…and where he had the vacuum lines removed from the throttle body is very crappy looking…

The aluminum welds that I paid $75 per weld for have pin holes where the BOV is attached to the throttle body.
When you are inside the car, and you want to get out….GOOD LUCK! My properly working door is no longer working…you have to now put the window down and open the door from the outside because the inside handle no longer works
The horn is no longer working (haven’t hooked it up yet to find out why…but I am scared that it is due to the anti-theft…I REALLY pray that it isn’t just honking away…I will find out soon I guess
I was told that he was putting a metal head gasket in the car from Titan…after looking, its stock…
All the clips for the wiring harness were supposed to be replaced with new clips…all except 2 of the fuel injector clips are broken, and the clip going to the water temperature deal is broken…(that’s just the ones I have found so far)
We couldn’t figure out why the car had a miss…started pulling wires on the coils and found that the #6 coil was bad…
The like half inch vacuum line that is supposed to run from the intake to the little black box on the back of the intake manifold (donno the proper name for it) is not hooked up nor does it have a filter on it…
When the new turbo was mounted, it had to be twisted a little for it to fit in the bay…when he did this (he had 2 weeks to do it) he didn’t fix the down pipe to fit to it properly, so now I have an exhaust leak off the turbo, as well as when he put the turbo in, he smashed the brake line up against the water line on the side of the turbo…as the motor moves, it is wearing a hole in the brake line…

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-__- 2jz 350Z -__- NSN Garage

travismaser

I think I have names the majority of everything we found on the first quick look over…so I sent Tony an email (if you want to see the email, PM me and I will gladly send you a copy) that was very professional…I did not bash him in any way..but told him all the issues I found…I asked that I could keep half of the labor charges because I felt the job was less than half way done…in return I wouldn’t bash his company and I would just fix the small problems it had…he quickly agrees and said sorry…so I got $2000.00 back…this was still a huge loss for me because just to have the body work alone fixed…I would be near that…BUT I didn’t want any trouble…
But now the greatest part!!!! As we were fixing the coil issue, we got it to run smooth!...no miss, no sounds, it was perfect!!! UNTIL you gave it a little throttle….then I wanted to cry…at around 2000 rpms you can hear rod knock….sooooo we immediately shut the motor down and that’s where I sit at the moment….$16,000.00ish dollars in a build that has all of these problems (and I assume even more that we will find during the rebuild) AND a motor that has rod knock…
I called Tony immediately and all he had to say was that it wasn’t his fault and that it was my fault that the motor was knocking…
So I told him that I needed some sort of help with this new issue and he would not answer me...i told him that I could not let anyone else go through the same as I have, and that I was going to make sure that that didn’t happen…so here I am telling you guys my experience so that you know what kind of quality of work Shifted is capable of.

missing nuts,

great shifter that was build for me:

how the power steering resevoir was held on...keeps falling off...had to zip tie it up

he had the nerve to sign the car "built with pride"

intercooler pipe rubbing

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-__- 2jz 350Z -__- NSN Garage

Edwin562

WOW and still had the nerve to sign "built with pride" BS!!!!!

dreamer87

dam man sucks to see you went through all this crap. keep your head up tho man your shit will be up and runnning the way it should be soon

tricky_ab

Him signing the car after all those problems would burn me up...What a tosser!

Corbic

Wow, that some crap.

irritatedmax

Geez louise. What a headache! It sucks when people don't know their capabilities and promise the world (in a very convincing manner). Hopefully the new shop will get you sorted out.

For the power steering reservoir, it looks like a 240's mount. Undo that bolt that the bracket it is over and put the bracket's notch in between the rubber bushing and the washer. Then tighten it back down.

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travismaser

yea, i tried that...it just rattels loose...there is a stock mounting point about 3 inches over towars the fender that he should have used...guess he built the car blind folded...

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-__- 2jz 350Z -__- NSN Garage

Royal13

I would be absolutely furious in your situation. You seem to be handling it pretty well though, leave this shit company in the past and keep this build on it's way to stardom!

florante rea

Sorry to hear that man. U should sue his ass. Im just speechless about the shifter he made

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fdrea

k20s13collins

I myself am a shop owner, and in no way do I feel the need to bad mouth any other shop, however we in the performance field have to remember that when doing a project, we're not just changing parts and making components "work" we're doing ART. Every part of this project has been put together just to move around, the art and the pride of the build is completely lost. So many simple things could have been done, intercooler piping cut properly, actual time spent on the shifter, properly fitted down pipe, and even the use of a fender cover. These are the mess ups that give the automotive industry a bad name and make it difficult for auto shops. Good luck with the car, and good luck on person who has to make it right!

ahmedootie

EVERYTHING you have gone through aside, This leaves me speechless.

Highway Riding

That last pic is straight up poopy!

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The Sun Rises in the East!

1sickS14

Talk about a "redneck" hack! This is epitome of horrible workmanship. No worries, businesses such as this won't last long.

vas570sx

holy hell.

sue sue sue.

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travismaser

MORE INFO: my custom drive shaft is about 2" too short!!! he had it just pulled out of the trans to make up for it..missing a nut on the turbo flange... and all my power stearing lines were held on with water clamps...explains my leaks...pics to follow

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-__- 2jz 350Z -__- NSN Garage

jesse_s13

This sucks soo bad.

Sue? Or some kind of compensation?

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travismaser

hey guys! just so everyone knows...Stance monkeys on facebook is posting an article tonight about the whole situation (the owner of stance monkeys is the shop manager at shifted) please check it out!! i am actually really curious to see what is said on "the other side of the story"

__________________
-__- 2jz 350Z -__- NSN Garage

travismaser

new pics of the motor being pulled out!!

b4 the pics...here is a quick list of things to look for
-driveshaft about 2 inchs too short
-water clamps on power steering lines (was loose and leaking)
-missing nut on turbo flange (was i guess too hard to get too)
-exhaust manifold was missing 2 bolts, 2 of the remaining were loose
-5 different types of bolts on trans mount
-onlu one bolt, ONE, on the pass side of the transmission holding the trans to the trans mount....the one on the drivers side was missing
-missing 2 bell housing bolts
-heater core clamps were finger tight
-radiator drain was finger tight (no idea how this didnt leak)
-when pulling motor, the passenger side motor mount FELL OFF! the drivers side was loose and only held on with 2 bolts

on to the pics:
the JB welded fitting pulled out


for a i guess, cleaner look...he drilled out the rivet in the VIN tag to run a zip tie thru to hold the breather lines


he made sure he had that exhause as tight as possible didnt he!


my power steering leak


this is where the drive shaft fits in the back of trans...this is how short it is...i think his measurments were a little off???


fuel lines zip tied to sub frame...sube frame was missing a bolt


zip tie attached to t-bolt clamp holding inner fender well up


this isnt THAT bad..but could have been cleaner...cut the bumper support up



fans were not mounted, at all...just wedged in there


missing nut on manifold to turbo


guess this explaines why my EGT's dont work


missing starter bolt


THIS MADE ME WANT TO CRY!!!i paid $220.00 for this shifter extension!!! broken then JB welded!!!


missing bolts from mounts to motor

on both sides


bolt block off...


this is what held the trans to the trans mount...this ONE bolt (that was loose)



got a new socket out of the deal!!! wooo


AND LAST BUT IM SURE NOT LEAST!!! (still have to look inside yet)

crack in my "new" 1jz flywheel

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-__- 2jz 350Z -__- NSN Garage

gretz

Wow... almost no words to describe this... It would be hard to do that bad of a job even if you just "Threw it together"... Im very interested to see his response

ssigma6

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ssigma6

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ssigma6

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Corbic

^ FYI - I'd blur out his address and phone number.

KiLLeR2001

This guy owes you a mint condition 2006 350z in stock form, I wouldn't accept anything less. There is too much neglect and a sheer lack of knowledge on how to build a car. Completely destroyed it, this is *almost* as bad as car theft.

This is why I'm a firm believer in the saying, "If you want something right, do it yourself."

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delado

For the gentlemen who replied representing the shop:

You are full of excuses and take blame for most of the fuck ups. Well that's cool and all, and you later add how "well if we would have road tested it we would have caught these issues". Well, not really because NON OF THAT SHIT SHOULD OCCUR IN THE FIRST PLACE! IT JUST SHOULDN'T. Someone in YOUR shop welded that abomination you call a shifter and obviously agreed that it was going to STAY LIKE THAT because he didn't chuck it across the room, HE INSTALLED IT, AND LEFT IN ON THE CAR (covered by a shift boot, fucking smart).

The stripped fitting on the valve cover. "Oh they all strip waahhhh". Ok? So when it stripped (as in right in that very single moment) whoever the installer was should have grabbed a tap and die set.welded on a new fitting/found a new valve cover, and repaired. But of course mixing up some JB is obviously quicker. What the fuck kind of shit is that?




Why would you waste your time tightening up those fittings^^??

Yes, you take blame and you're sorry, but sorry just doesn't fucking cut it! What kind of moron does this shit? It's common fucking sense that even some dumb "hick" would realize this will NOT WORK.

I can go on and on but this just make me sick. I'm sure another member will finish you off.

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titangts

wow...and i thought i got screwed since i lost a lil over $8000 on my rx7 build... im speechless.. this was even worse..

Corbic

Travis, one question.

How could the car be done before New years if you where still shipping in parts you received for Christmas and the motor was not even finished being assembled?

MY350Z.COM Forums - View Single Post - my Toyota 350Z build

Besides, its not like you would even be able to drive if after New Years, what with your DUI and all.

MY350Z.COM Forums - View Single Post - my Toyota 350Z build

fliprayzin240sx

This picture alone shows the quality of work you do...really, what the fuck is this?


Whether or not you were rushed...that is not something I would have let out of my garage. You Sir, should never ever work on a car again...

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