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| - First, let me open with something: PLEASE do not provide reviews for mechanic shops after an oil change. That is not a car repair, it's a barely trivial task that deserves no praise for completing correctly. Many shops' ratings are artificially inflated from reviews like this and it hurts the rest of us. Case in point: Griffin Brothers
The TL:DR of this review is that the guys at Griffin Brothers Pineville are incompetent at any service beyond an oil change, and spent every turn of a nightmare, multi month ordeal outright lying to my face about the work they had performed. What should have been a one-and-done (but still expensive) episode transformed into literally dozens of hours of redoing (or performing for the first time) work I was charged for, wrangling for them to stand behind their warranty, and inconvenience organizing shuttles/pickups to and from the shop. Nothing is more important than honesty in a mechanic, even if they're not particularly competent. Griffin Brothers should be classified as outright crooked.
It started with a busted valve cover gasket on my 2002 BMW which led to a huge oil leak. It happened on a Sunday when my wife was out of town, and the only place open with the part nearby was Griffin Brothers.
After $1400, probably about $300 more than I would have been charged somewhere else (my fault for letting the problem sneak up on me) I drove away. A couple days later, my service engine light came on. I pull out my code reader and it's my secondary air system. I won't bore you with the specifics, but to diagnose the problem takes, at a minimum, a couple hours with an ice cold engine and a huge amount of disassembly. It ends up that, while replacing some tubing, a 1-way valve was replaced incorrectly at GB!! This would have failed an NC inspection, and probably cost someone else nearly $300 in labor to diagnose and fix, and that's assuming they get it right the first time! At the moment I thought it was an honest mistake and moved on with my life.
About 1.5 months afterward and maybe 2k miles, I realized that oil was once again leaking from the exact same spot it had been.
I brought the car back, explaining where the oil was leaking and my theory that perhaps sealant had not been applied to the gasket. I had to have my wife come pick me up, with a pit in my stomach. Asking a mechanic to own up to their previous work is a real test and most of them will fail it. True to my instinct, I received a call the next morning where I was basically told that they could see no oil in the engine bay.
I left early from work, arriving home. In order to get to the shop before it closed, I had to get a GB driver to come pick me up. I arrived at the shop with my car pulled out up front, and popped the hood with the front desk worker and the head mechanic, hoping that the leak was difficult to find for the sake of my sanity. Instead, what I found was a clearly obvious pool of oil. I stuck my finger down in the area, picked up a gob, and held it up to the light. You could cut the tension with a butter knife. Cue some mumbling and evasions about how "that wasn't there before" etc. even after I had already told these guys that I'd done my due diligence for testing.
I left the next day for a short vacation. I knew that this wasn't the end of the saga. Sure enough, 2 days later, I get a call and a quote for $900. This time, the story is that the valve cover is cracked. Now, there's a chance that the thing had spontaneously cracked itself from pedestrian driving for the first time in its 13-year existence. The chance of that is astronomically low. If this problem somehow existed before, why on earth was it only popping up now? How come it had not been caught when the valve cover was initially removed? The only logical, and most likely conclusion, was that while replacing the gasket, someone did not use a torque wrench and overtightened a bolt. It took 2 more stressful phone calls before I finally got someone to agree to replace the broken valve cover as part of the warranty. No responsibility was taken in the matter. On one hand, anything's possible. On the other, the only reason why this repair was covered was probably because the evidence was so overwhelming it was impossible to dispute.
Finally, I cracked open my engine this weekend to diagnose an issue with quickly burning oil. The symptoms pointed to bad VANOS seals - a part Griffin Brothers had supposedly replaced in a time-intensive and delicate process. Simply put, there was no way that they had done what they charged me for. I expected the seals to be bad - they clearly hadn't been replaced for 25 or 50 thousand miles. I could have forgiven them for saying "We can't do it". To lie and hope that I never figured out what had happened makes Griffin Brother's the lowest of the low.
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