Flying Finn

John,

I'm not disagreeing with you. If your mechanic put, say 100 miles to your car, it would mean in a way nothing and I'd presonally do nothing but in your case, the fact that he disconnected the odo is very fishy and I'd demand an explanation & be really pissed about it!

What makes it little more strange is that your mechanic told you about it? Since he did it, it seems he didn't do a lot of miles etc. but what are the "testings" he did? Very strange.

As far as the other stuff (poor shifting etc.), you need to have them fixed.

Why do you need to know how to disconnect the odo? You mean the way I assume your mechanic did it by totally disconnecting it (you lose the speed also) or just the odo while retaining the speedo?
Disconnecting the whole gauge is easy, just pull it out from the dash and disconnect the cable on the back. But like I said, you then also lose the speedo.

BEATSPX

Apologies for the confusion, Finn. Yes, the odo and speedo are currently disconnected. That's how I realized the odometer was disconnected right away (drove about 5 miles and realized my speedometer wasn't working).

Regarding his admitting to doing so:He told me the disconnection was for 'testing purposes' and "he does it all the time;" he told his friend at the body shop he disconnected it because he was working on another car with a speedometer problem and needed to look at mine to determine what was going on(?) with the broken one. Both stories make no sense. Bottom line is it was raining in Atlanta most of the time I was in CA, how only owns a motorcycle, and wanted to (at a minimum) drive my car instead of his bike in the rain. He's an avid racing fan, so I can only hope there weren't any races in the SE while I was gone, or else he probably went there with a friend as well.

Bottom line is the guy is a liar and the only thing he did which I can do anything about is admitting to disconnecting the odometer. I'm going for an affidavit from him stating how much he drove it (which I'm sure will be a lie), see if I can do the same with the two witnesses, and after seeing how things play out take it from there.

And I have tried to settle with him (even after I played back the portion of the recording where he admits to disconnecting it; showed him the law which states messing with the odo is criminal, for whatever the reason, etc.). I already paid him $500 for repairs, so he was going to pay the body shop bill of $1,500 (so net $1,000). Figured, again, just wanted to move on...

But he didn't follow through with the verbal agreement (what a surprise).

Getting back to reconnecting the odometer and speedometer... Do I just need to look under the dash unit for something disconnected?

Please tell me there's more to it than that...

Many thanks,
John

Wilder

John: I'm really sorry about your situation. On my previous post, my point was that a negligible unrecorded change in mileage is not worth disclosing for several reasons:

a) When buying a car, there is no difference between a car with 45,283 miles and a car with 45,383 miles.
b) Odo mileage is a crapshoot to begin with. Changing tire diameter can throw off actual mileage vs recorded mileage by far higher deviations.
c) Situations like having the odo give up on you while driving would mean that there would be some unrecorded miles anyway.

However, you've now clarified that there is no way for you to know if he clocked 100 mi or 2,000 mi and that complicates things. I’m not one to follow "law" because my opinion of law is not very high. Personally, I'm of the camp that relies on principles and values to guide how I choose to think and conduct myself. For someone like me, this is a judgment call and now that you’ve provided more info, I think you're doing the right thing under the full explanation just as much as I still think that 80 to 150 mi of unrecorded mileage, provided you can quantify it, as per my understanding before your full explanation, would be just fine undeclared and declaring it would in fact be "making a mountain out of a molehill".

To reconnect the odo, you only need to pull the unit out and plug it back in. See p-car.com for full details under odo gear replacement.

GG33

Okay - It looks like the parts you failed to tell us initially are now turning it into a more serious issue. If the car is now behaving as you claim, then I would go for the mechanic - BIG TIME. Although I find it hard to beleive that even he had taken on a track day. that it cause the kind of damage you are talking about. Consider getting it looked at by someone who knows 993's really well.

GG

BEATSPX

Louis, my man, thanks for your post. Much appreciated. The reality is this whole thing sucks. No one has the time to mess with low-lifes like this, especially when you are in the process of starting up a new company. I'm putting in 90+ hr wks and his is not the sort of distraction I need at the moment.

My Porsche is about my only true luxury and washing it on the weekend with my daughters (assuming I'm not working) is one of life's true pleasures for me - yes, even better than driving and having it turn corners like it's on rails and the sound of the engine with the sunroof open and windows down on a cool, sunny day.

I'm not altogether that strong of an advocate of the law, either. I use it when it helps friends, family, or my personal situation. However, in this case we're talking about potentially screwing the next naive, first time Porsche owner (the club I joined and am only recently learning to climb my way out of the naive hole).

The consensus opinion seems to be that yes, some form of justice ought to be dished out to the mechanic (for now, leaving that in Karma's hands) and that the condition of the car will ultimately speak for itself. I almost had a complete top-end rebuild done and have personally put very few miles on it, so until the mechanic got it I was highly confident about almost all aspects of the car.

So now, I'm going to have it taken to Kinetic (a highly reputable place and get everything fixed). I'll bring my receipts for parts and work claimed to have been done on the car by the scumbag mechanic and the prior scumbag with whom I dealt. I'll fill him in on what has happened and see if it the wear on the car is consistent with my story or if there is an equally plausible explanation for what is happening.

AFTER gathering more unbiased, fact-based information, I'll decide whether to do as I initially proposed (chalk it up to experience and move on
or to gather evidence now and wait until some point within the next 2 years (before statute of limitations runs out) when I have more time, take the gloves off, and go after him both criminally and by taking civil action.

Without putting myself at risk of a baseless defamation lawsuit, please PM me if you are considering having an independent in Conyers, GA, work on your car with the name of the place.

Will keep you posted.
John

p.s., will look at p-car odo replacement for info on the reconnection. thanks!

Flying Finn

Now that I realize how you found out about the disconnection etc. I can see why he did it and understand better what kind of a bastard that mechanic is.

While in theory he might've actually used your speedo to see what's the problem with the other car's speedo (if you use functioning speedo from other car, you can least test whethet it's the actual speedo that's the problem or something else), you can not trust him at all at this point.
If he had used it for testing purposes, he would've FOR SURE remembered to connect the cable when putting speedo back (it's a quick 10 min thing to test this and then put everything back, you just don't forget to do it when the cable is tangling out from the hole where speedo goes), it's obvious he had it off becasue he drove it and didn't want the mileage to be shown.
And if he only wanted to drive your car for 20-50 miles or something, there was no need to do disconnect the speedo and this leads me to believe there was a lot of driving he didn't want to show.

FYI, Re-connecting the odo/speedo is very easy. Just pull out the speedo gauge from the dash. You can use some dull knife, large screw driver or similar for prying it out a little and then just pulling by hand. Use some fabric between the knife & dash to prevent any damage.

After it's out, just connect the wire to the back of the gauge (look the pins on the back of the gauge & holes in the connector and you can see which way it should go).

Randy 1

Sorry, this is PRECISELY why the letter of the law needs to be the guideline here. Who's to say your principals and values are adequate? I agree with you, in this case, that ~100 miles is de minimus, but what's to stop someone from thinking that 1,000 miles is a "molehill"? How about 5,000 miles? In this case, it's even worse: no-one will ever know how many miles were driven, thus, "true mileage LEGITIMATELY unknown"!

I'm not trying to be sanctimonious (and I'm obviously going to sound that way), but the attitudes exhibited in this post towards disclosure of important issues like mileage and condition are the reason wrenches can get away with $300 - $500 for an honest, thorough PPI. It's a thin veneer of security against what the difference between what the seller knows and what the seller is telling.

Put another way, ROKN, if you're guided by well-intentioned principal, why not just go ahead and disclose everything if it's such a negligible issue?

TheOtherEric

What confuses me most about this thread is that BEATSPX seems so obsessed with doing the "right" thing and disclosing such a triviality, but doesn't seem concerned with preventing this from happening to others. Seems a tad hypocritical, or maybe just self-centered. Sorry for being blunt, it's just my take.

Here's what you should do BEATSPX: tell all of his customers what he did. Post the details and his name all over Rennlist. Post it all on other car forums. When people google him or do searches on "atlanta shops" hopefully they'll read it.

And since everyone is so concerned with every letter of the law, let me reassure you that he can do nothing about it. It's not slander/libel if it's true.

TheOtherEric

I totally agree with you, and yes I'd certainly disclose a 2,000 mile error. I was just discussing provable damages there. It sounds like he only drove it around town for a few days, and that's the only reason I'm being so flippant. (but yes, I'd still be PISSED if I were you!)

Wilder

Randy: To answer your question, it's the "severe loss in value and complexities associated with selling a true-miles-unknown car" part that would cause me to asses whether the amount of unrecorded miles warrant legal disclosure as "true miles unknown".

You seem to have missed my point. Indicating that "for me" this would have to be a personal "judgment call" is specifically pointing to the fact that I personally see this as a subjective matter in which "I" would have to decide whether or not to potentially incur the downside of such disclosure if I was in John's shoes.

If my car clocked a "few" unrecorded miles due to my odo breaking while driving, using larger tires than OE spec or a mechanic accidentally disconnecting the odo, I would resort to my own experience, principles and values to determine what amount of miles warrant disclosure or non-disclosure. If it were me and I knew that the car had clocked 40 unrecorded miles under one of the above scenarios, I wouldn't sweat it. However, if my mechanic intentionally disconnected the odo to clock miles without consent and the number of unrecorded miles potentially driven could not be determined, then my "personal judgment" and idea of "doing the right thing" would in fact be to disclose this information, as painful as that might be.

You seem to be a "by-the-book" type of guy and I respect that, I just don't subscribe to that type of thinking. I do, however, believe that you have the right to your own opinions, no matter how much they might differ from mine.

hddude

What crappy legal advice. I hope you don't charge for such advice. Yes, any law text will tell you that truth is a defense to slander. BUT, the mechanic can still sue for slander and and that means big bucks for a lawyer for the respondent to defend himself. Even if we assume the respondent will win -- and who knows for sure -- there is no guarantee the judge will award him attorney's fees. That's up to the judge's discretion. He could win and still end up much lighter in his wallet.

FLYT993

John--

What is the name of this idiot? If he's done this with your car, it's not a leap of faith to assume he's done with cars before yours, and will continue to do so...because no one has really put a fire to his ***. Unethical conduct like his is reason enough to publicize his name, so fellow RL'ers don't take their cars to him.

In truth, he probably didn't rack up a ton of miles, but whether he drove 10 or 1000 is not the point. If you rob a bank for $.25 or $250k, it doesn't matter in the eyes of the law. Wrong is wrong. For those who say, well "he came clean"...yeah, but he came clean like a weasel, i.e., after the fact. He wouldn't get any more of my business, and I'd ensure everyone knew the BS move he pulled.

c993k

This play has superseded all common logic.
Nothing makes sense. Walk away!

BEATSPX

What confuses me most about this thread is that BEATSPX seems so obsessed with doing the "right" thing and disclosing such a triviality, but doesn't seem concerned with preventing this from happening to others. Seems a tad hypocritical, or maybe just self-centered. Sorry for being blunt, it's just my take.

Well, I have to disagree with you on two points: First, I think that it has already been established this isn't a trivial matter; Second, plastering the b@stards name all over, Rennlist, which should oshould be the very least I can do, ugh the minimmum his non will only put me at meaningful legal risk. I do caroi\e about Not letting this guy do this to someone else, especially another Rennlister; hence, my recommendation to contact me before taking your car to this place in Conyers.
or the record, I've already, I hope, made Peter Wendr[]]wentnhsj g a o y think twice before attempted to defraud another customer. And I'm not even close to being done with him. I've taking one crooked wrench off the street - which is probably more than most have done.

I mention his name because he lost on all counts in my lawsuit, which is a matter of public record. Rather than do what, at the bare minimum would be the 'right' thing and plaster his name all over this website and others (thereby exposing me to additional legal haggsls.

John Velasco

my friends and the mechanic would have a sit down. I do not care as much about the miles, but the state of the car. Sombody would pay. It may be dollers or somthing other!

If