Warning to anyone in the Phoenix area

[Project1970]

Shop to avoid: Brakes Plus on Chandler and 48th.

Why?

Well, I got new tires on my truck yesterday, and I knew it needed an alignment judging by the way the Radial T/A's wore. So I saw their ad for a $33 alignment...sweet.

So I took it in, they lift it up...

They come back. "Yeah, you need new upper ball joints and cross shafts. But we need to know what year the parts are." I tell them, they come back with a price... $461. I say just align it anyway, then after five minutes, they come back and say "We can't do it unless you get those parts fixed." So I walk out and look under my truck just for the heck of it...

They didn't turn a single bolt. Kind of hard to tell whether a balljoint is bad without even removing it from the spindle or the A-arm...and by the way, this is a 3-year-old 20,000-mile piece from my Early Classic kit, not the originals (which were FINE when I took them off after 29 years and 100,000 miles).

Took it over to the Purcell's on Ray and 40th (approx) and they did it for $50. I asked just for my own sake "How did the front end look?"

"We've never seen one tighter."

Chatted a bit more, and apparently that shop in particular gets a lot of Brake Plus' work. Apparently, Brake Plus won't do a brake job for under $500 - they wanna do calipers and hoses and the whole nine yards. At least they didn't charge me anything - but they didn't do anything other than waste my time, either. They're gonna hear it from me, and so is the Attorney General and the BBB. Maybe a news station or two if they have really really easy ways to do those customer-complaint things (I'm lazy, you see, hehe)