Be warned: Phoenix Remanufactured Transmissions

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This is all very interesting, but it happened back in 2002, and I have to ask if Phoenix has remained as bad as this for the last FOUR YEARS then why are they still in business?

I also will repeat what I said back in October on the Chrysler newsgroup regarding these folks:

"The cheapest remanufacturer/rebuilder in the country that rebuilds these and ships them out all over the country that I've seen advertised is Phoenix Hard Parts in Phoenix AZ, they sell them for $625. But, this is without converter, and shipping is an additional $260, plus you have to pay to ship your core to them which is at least another $200 or so in shipping costs, plus if your core has anything seriously wrong with it - like a broken gear in it - they don't accept the core and you get no core refund. And while they advertise American-made parts, they don't advertise American-made 'hard parts' (ie: gears) which is what really matters since the gears are what take the power and cheap gears will fall apart under load."

Also I'll say one other thing about this website. You bought a transmission from them and halfway through decided to back out of the deal. Up to that point they showed a perfect willingness to work with you. After that point they dug in their heels. You observed this yourself. What you don't understand is that even the best rebuilders can make mistakes. If your paying a mechanic $2200 to do a turn key job on a transmission, he's damn well going to test the vehicle 6 ways to Sunday before you get it back, and if he happened to sub out the rebuild job to a place like Phoenix and the same problems happened, you would never know about them because he would be eating the labor costs. But if you elect to try to save $600 or so by doing your own project management then your going to have to learn to deal with stuff like this. And nickel and dime items like bitching about a banged up oil pan is rediculous. If Les was doing his job he would have not used the dented pan he would have used your pan, and he would have tested the vehicle when he got it put back together, you would have not had it blow up on you 5 blocks away from Les's shop.

If your going to use a professional mechanic to do work on your vehicle then you let HIM buy the parts, you don't go buying them yourself and giving them to him to put in. If you think you know better than the mechanic, then you should be doing the service work, not him.

Ted

Reply to
Ted Mittelstaedt

I suspect the problem is not with ALL Phoenix Remanufactured Transmissiotn, but only the one that you happened to get. The real issue is whether they were willing to make it right, and it would appear that they were. Looks like the problem is on your end.

Reply to
John S.
2 meesed up transmissions and torque converters and you think this is coincedence? Come on....

Me backing out of the deal is completely understandable as I simply can't afford to wait a month or so as they continuously send me trannies, hoping to get one that works.

The fact that they showed a willingness to work with me to solve the problem means nothing if their quality is unaccaptable. Look at it this way: if I hire some guys to do the drywall on my new house and it's obvious after a few days on the job that they have no clue what their doing, does the fact that they're willing to work with me to solve the problem mean anything? How's about if I gave them another week and saw no improvements? I mean it's nice that they offered... but I don't have the time to wait and see if they can eventually get it right. The solution is to fire them and hire someone compitent to finish the job.

You're assuming I'm not a gearhead? Nobody's perfect and this is why I was willing to give it another go. After the 2nd one I gave up.

I agree.. and I could care less about the pan. It's merely an indication as to what to expect from the transmission as a whole.

I have to aggree with you however that this incident happened several years ago. However I'm still getting emails from other Phoenix customers but have yet to post them on the website. (I just moved domains) I appreciate the honest opinions here though....

-Adam

Reply to
ajcrm125

========== ==========

Ditto

what Ted said.

~:~ Marsh Monster ~sips his crownroyal~

Reply to
Marsh Monster

Everybody wants to save a buck, but sometimes our efforts end up getting us deeper in the poop. These are hard lessons to be learned.

Reply to
<HLS

No, but as I said, you elected to be your own project manager on this deal.

Here is how a professional mechanic would have handled this, who had never dealt with Phoenix before, and was testing them out on a customer.

At the point you were at, on the second broken trans and converter, the professional would give up and eat the cost and get the transmission from someone else. He would of course never use Phoenix ever again. But, he would have the attitude that this was a test, and would not have set his expectations too high. To him, the value of learning that Phoenix is a POS rebuilder is probably worth the cost of a rebuilt transmission.

To you, since your only doing a single transmission, finding out that Phoenix was a bunch of shit-heads doesen't have any value at all. So far this is understood..

But, what your not recognizing is that when you decide to play in the big boys arena, you always take the risk that your going to find out that a supplier is a shit-head. The big boys consider this an acceptable risk and part of doing business. You aren't, when you need to be.

When I decided to go ahead and do the R&R on my own A604 last summer, I always knew from the beginning that I might possibly get myself in over my head, for example $1000 into the vehicle, I would be calling the tow truck to tow the entire pile to the junkyard. But, I made the decision to take the risk of this happening before I even bought the vehicle with a bad tranny. The greater the risk the greater the reward, but it is always still risk. If we all took risks and none of us ever failed on a risk we took, then none of us would really be taking any risks now, would we?

You chose to project-manage your transmission rebuild rather than paying someone else to do it. Thus, when the risk fails (through no fault of your own) because a supplier lies and doesen't measure up, well then you must take the bad with the good, write it off and move on because that is what risk is all about.

It's the way you backed out that I think was the problem. There's a right way and a wrong way. You got to keep in mind that at that point, they had your money, you had nothing, that is they had all the cards. You have to, well there's no better way to say it so I'll just say it, you have no choice but to kiss their ass. You have to be really nice, really polite, a bit firm, and never say anything to burn your bridges. All you really had to do after trans #2 failed was to take the next trans from them, spend a couple minutes putting a few greasy fingerprints on it, then call them and lie like a dog and say you spent lots of money and trans #3 didn't work, and send that back without even connecting it to the engine. You do this a few more times and they are eventually going to give up. Of course, once you get your money back than you blast the shit out of them with your website. ;-)

that's an apples to oranges comparison. When you hire folks like this the usual procedure is half down, half on completion.

Post 'em!

Ted

Reply to
Ted Mittelstaedt

You have to be espically careful when what your paying for is primariarly labor. Good craftspeople with experience almost always have a pretty good idea of their value, and don't work very cheap.

Ted

Reply to
Ted Mittelstaedt

Not sure I understand what you are saying. Are you implying that Phoenix reman transmissions are of poor quality?

Reply to
John S.

No, I believe that snipped-for-privacy@nospam.nix is saying, that there are reasons that "do it yourself" is "usually" a way to save money. One reason is that the diy customer assumes more risk. You have a chance of getting a bum unit, from any vendor. For the do-it-yourselfer, this is a significant event and an enormous pain in the neck. For a commercial shop, they recognize that it happens once in a while, and deal with it.

This is not to say that the ordinary customer cannot benefit from doing his own work. What it does say, is that sooner or later, if you replace enough parts, you are going to get a bad one, and it is not really anyone's fault. If you cannot handle it, when this happens, either financially, emotionally, or in terms of lost time, then have other people do your work for you.

Earle

Reply to
Earle Horton

"do

emotionally,

That is complete bull. While it can happen that you will get a bad part, there really is no excuse for two in a row. The fact that they are still in business shows that they do not treat commercial shops that way and if they send one a bad one, they make damn sure that the second one is ok. I guess that they don't feel the need to back up the DIY'er that way. Thanks for the info however. At least I know who to avoid if and when I need to get a rebuilt trans.

Reply to
TBone

Phoenix does a huge amount of advertising on Ebay and correct me if I'm wrong but I don't think many commercial garages spend a lot of time trolling Ebay for parts. Also if you read Phoenix's website you will see that they go out of their way to make it easy for DIYers to buy their transmissions.

There really is, I think, two ways to look at it. I once had a conversation with the sales manager for Arizona Mobile Air, Inc.

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I had bought a compressor from them. (Top notch company, by the way) They cater to the DIYers and to the commercial garages. I asked him if they got more returns from DIYers or commercial garages. He said overwhelmingly the commercial garages. The Diyers follow all instructions to a T and are usually very careful when installing parts, they will flush the system per the instructions and so forth. The commercial garages will take shortcuts and not follow instructions. He said that far and away the DIYers were more profitable for them and less of a headache. That wasn't to say they never had problems with DIYers, they did, but that they had more from commercial garages.

By the way, the compressor I got from them did work and lasted until the car threw a rod a year later.

It may be that Phoenix knows this also and that is why they cater to the DIY market. But OTOH it may be that they know that the DIY market is less likely to fight back and is easier to screw over.

But the other thing about this story that I keep coming back to is that there's transmission rebuilders everywhere, every major city has many of them. The simple weight and freight costs of shipping transmissions would seem to me to pretty strongly convince most people to buy local. Not only that but there's the local economy to think of as well - wouldn't you rather spend your money keeping some local businesses doors open, than sending it out across country?

Ted

Reply to
Ted Mittelstaedt

My "local" guy is useless to me, just called him up last week asking for a price on a refresh for a '63 Studebaker Flightomatic, he said "can't help you, I can't get parts for it." Now I know that's not true, but I'm not about to argue with a guy who's already decided he doesn't want to work for me. Even if he does grudgingly do the work after I "find" (after an exhausting 5-minute web search) a kit for it, it's not going to be because he wants to, because he clearly doesn't. Also for many people their "local" shop is an AAMCO or Cottman franchise, I've heard enough horror stories that I wouldn't want to go there either.

One of these days I will have to teach myself how to work on auto transmissions...

nate

Reply to
Nate Nagel

Nate Nagel did pass the time by typing:

What a lot of these so called "big box" transmission shops don't tell you is that they outsource the real work or simply do transmission swaps then send your unit in to be referbished in a factory somewhere and put back on the rack.

One of my friends asked me if $1200 to repair a turbo hydromatic 350 was a good price. Damn near crapped my drawers laughing.

The TH-350 is only one of the least complicated and longest production run transmissions in history. $300 is what a good rebuild should cost.

Reply to
DougW

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