OK, so earlier this week I had my exhaust ceramic coated. It is the stock DRZ end-can, that has been gutted. It looked quite miff and was covered in old mud. They ceramic coated it a nice shiny shilver, it set me back R430-odd. Which is quite a bit.
When I took delivery of the exhaust I noted that my header nut and bolt were gone, I handed in the exhaust with these two attached. I told their head guy and he said they would replace them, I drove straight to Suzuki South, bought them and then sent the invoice to the exahust people. Cost me about an hour of my time and some petrol, I billed them the R60 for the nut and bolt.
Then I fit the exhaust and ride out to Superbike Solutions, it's about a 20/30 minute ride. As I get about 5 minutes away my bike starts to sound like it's dieing. I am thinking 'fark, my big end bearing is gone', and I want to cry. The noise gets worse, weird rattling, uneven idling, backfiring, but strangely the bike still rides fine.
I get there and I see that the end cap of the exhaust has fallen off- they did not fasten it back on properly when they treated the exhaust. So the end cap has fallen off and ripped one of the threads out the back of the can, and tearing the gasket in half. Also, they removed the gasket from the header pipe (partly my fault because I did not notice when I put the pipe back on), so that has rattled loose, the header bracket is bouncing around and scratching the pipe and the two new nuts have fallen off.
I phone them immediately and tell them what has happened. The owner flips and starts swearing about his staff and then promises to pay for whatever it costs.
I get home phone scorch and phone suzuki, get prices and draft him a nice mail about it all. I ask him to pay for the new exhaust end-can, which is R2000 and the header gasket, which I guess is R50-R100, I offer to pay for the bolts that fell off because I didn't see the gasket was misisng.
Today he phones me and rather aggressively tells me I am being unreasonable and he's not paying R2000 for an exhaust that 'in his opinion is worth R200'. I feel bad asking him for R2000, but he damaged my exhaust and so should replace it.
We've chatted again and he reckons he will repair my end-can and not replace it. Is this fair? Should I push for the new tail pipe or accept a repair? If I had broken the pipe and was paying for it I would repair it, but I didn't, and I am not happy about having them break my pipe, even though the break is minor. However, I want to do what is honest/fair/acceptable in the industry under these circumstances?
Topic: Milddog's DRZ pimp thread (Read 7643 times)
