Be warned: Phoenix Remanufactured Transmissions

http://www.onecircuit.com/prtbad4u.html

 

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

 

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.

 

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

 

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Ditto

what Ted said.




~:~
Marsh Monster
~sips his crownroyal~

 

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.

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

No, I believe that 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

 

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.

 

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. (www.ackits.com) 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

 

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

 

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.

 

There's really no safe answer - the local guy is 95+% likely to put
Dexron™ plus an additive instead of the correct fluid in your DC vehicle
tranny.

Bill Putney
(To reply by e-mail, replace the last letter of the alphabet in my
address with the letter 'x')

 

ABsolutely.. in fact after I had the tranny done locally I found out
this is what they did. I went to an ATF+4's website, printed out the
specs and tried to explain to the guy that it's just not the same. In
the end we had to aggree to disagree and I had him drain and replace
all the fluid with stuff I bought. He kept reciting the additive
manufacture's specs. :"When you add this stuff to dexron it makes it as
good if not better than ATF+3/4.

Of course that's what they are going to say... they want you to buy
their damn product.