Around 2 months ago i encountered a severe bottom end knock on my forged SR20 built by Apt which run flawlessly for thousands of miles. this was due to an oil leak and me not checking the oil at the time as i did not realise an oil leak had occured. After much deliberation and speaking to numerous jap specualists i decided to go with garage d to carry out the engine build that was necessary as i belived them to be more than capabale of the work. I gave my car to garage d for a build using a new crank, rods, previous forged pistons (garage d recomended this) and new rings to be on the safe side along with new acl race bearings. After 8 weeks of waiting for what I assumed would be a simple 4 pot rebuild which i was promised would take as little as 2 weeks. So i started the run in process. I set my apexi power fc hand commander to limit my revs to 3,000 rpm to be completely safe. From the day i picked up the car it had a series of issues. They had snapped my carbon bonnet latch so my bonnet would bo longer lock without pins. The engine sounded like a bag of nails. My clutch release bearing sounded as if it wanted to jump out of my gearbox. Tonight i set out to rack up a few more run in miles as i had only reached 278 from the build date!!!!! It went fine for a while until at 2,500rpm just before a gear change into 3rd, i heard a loud bang, some grinding noises and an incredible knock from what i believe may be the top end. I really dont know what to do. Do you guys think garage d will honor their work and repaire it under some kind of warranty or is this slap bang work all i have to show for my £4k rebuild? I really need some help guys. Anyone have any dealings with garage d. Are they as good as i thought? And will they rectify the issues? Thanks in advance for your replies.
Have you contacted them before posting this up? Just wondering as they will give you a far better answer than anyone on here. You said it had a series of issues when you picked it up. Did you mention it at the time? Best thing you can do is get in touch with them today.
same as above and personally you may want to do yourself a favour and remove this post for now, contacting them directly should be the first point of call. You may find they are willing to help you out/come to solution.. maybe not so much after reading this? Lol
My experience with garage-d so far: 1) Very slow but... 2) Work seems good quality. I'd give them a call today, I believe Julian is off to Gatebil tomorrow so I'm hoping he's finishing my car!
My experience with Julian = gave the sweet talk on the phone, had my car nearly 2 months, then knocked my socks off by charging me £1300!!! loads of other broken stuff when I collected it, filthy,flat battery and still didn't fix the minor misfire (coilpack harness) which it went in for. Wouldn't speak to me in person about any of this when I collected the car. I was polite, courteous and patient whilst he was an arrogant arse. Fuck him. Good luck with that.
Jesus Christ £4k?? What was included in that bill? I am in the middle of rebuilding my forged engine and parts have cost me £500 and machine work about another £350-400 (haven't had my bill yet) Granted im doing it myself (stories like this being one of the reasons) but surely £4k is way too much. Agree with other posters that if the issue has occurred today/recently your best off getting back to them before commenting on here, hope its resolved easily for you mate. As for running it in, limiting it to 3000rpm isn't the right way about it, you need to bed the rings in properly by going up and down the revs at low loads and just stay off boost for a few hundred miles but people will tell you all different stories but this is the way I will be doing it personally.
Ha , most of the SR builds that come through my door are EASY £10k bills, machine work you can pay upto £600 alone for basic work (at a proper motorsport machine shop), unless your using shit parts there is no way you can properly rebuild a motor for £500 lol (Edit: rebuild with forged parts that is) Just all the basic stuff new from nissan is around £700 mark. most of the engine built we do with just basic spec all new bits and set of quality rods and pistons (not some eagle rods lol) easy over £3500 pull and installed.
"Rebuilding" my forged engine consisted of:- ARP bolts throughout OEM oil pump Rear crank seal ACL race bearings and thrust washers OEM inlet gaskets CP pistons rings All that came to £600. Didn't need new crank, rods or pistons (Brian Crower stroker kit) Granted the op had new crank and rods which would bump the bill up but £4k seemed a bit steep for rebuilding an already forged motor was what I was getting at.
Sorry, it wasn't a new crank, it was a used crank which they deemed suitable to go in my engine, as the old one welded itself the the bearings. Just for the record, my limit was set at 3000 for the no boost run in process, once I got to 300 miles I was going to remove the limit to properly seat the rings through the revs. (Not excessively obviously) Unfortunately I never got there... For a quick update, I have spoke to the garage, Julian himself is supposedly coming to pick the car up this evening, (Too right). We will find out what they say. Any reasonable garage should be taking the car back and rectifying things free of charge.
You should use the entire rev range when running in an engine, if you don't by the time you hit 300 miles the bores lose the roughness from the honing and won't seal up again the rings. Although that has bugger all to do with this as all that would cause would be a short life on the rings and excessive blowby, this sounds like a poor build. Tbh a friend of mine took a chaser in for a manual conversion that was supposed to be 2 weeks, took him nearly 2 months to get it back and had no end of issues such as clutch slipping gearbox leaking oil (all supplied by garage d) and only 3 bolts holding the box to the engine!
In regards to the engine rebuild cost, and having rebuilt mine to a pretty high spec, I know what Superclarkey means in terms of cost. Building with the right gear is FAR from cheap. Plus, there's always the fact Id much rather allow someone with experience of building high performance engines to make sure everything runs properly and will take the power I throw at it. As for the original dude, sorry to hear about the mess man. Hopefully he does the right thing and gives you what you paid for
As others have said, posting up a thread like this is a bit daft really. They cant help you if you havnt told them something is wrong! I have had lots of experience with garage D and have never had anything but amazing service, and know plenty of others the same. Engines have thousands of moving components, occasionaly things go wrong. But in answer to is this typical of garage D's work: no.
Hi guys. Since the car going back to Garge D to have the repaires done aftet a loose cam follwer in my fresh rebuild ive had more issues. Note: I am not mentioning this to intentionally slate garage d or hurt their business, Im doing it to help fellow drifters and the like to find the correct garage for themselves by posting my findings. The car was collected pretty quickly. Which was great. A few days went by with not allot of communication. When i finally heard from Garage D they decided the cam follower wasnt loose it was pushed off by my "tune" (which it ran perfectly with for 8,000miles prior) even though the car was given back to me in the first place with the assurance that it ran lovely. But none the less i listened and asked to have it mapped. A week later i had heard nothing. I call and call and feel im making a nuesance of myself. But without doing so i dont think Garage D would have contacted me once. So now a couple weeks have passed i still am without a car. Apparently the remap cant be done for a further week or so as the rolling road they use is "closed" (its a weak excuse but could be legit) So far my whole experience has been terrible from start to finish. Rebuild, return, run in, repair, remap. I have driven my car for around 2 weeks in total since owning it (getting on 4 months now). The rest of the time its been a lawn ornament for Garage D. So if you want you car rebuilt, repaired or remapped in any kind of timely manner i suggest you go elsewhere. Obviously this is just my experience/opinion. Hopefully I get it back rather sharpish, because quite frankly, this is taking the piss IMO.
Iv just joined to comment on this thread. I have been lurking around for a while reading through helpful threads to help fix my car etc. I also have an S14a although mine is not built nor tuned. I have been thinking of getting my car tuned. I wasn't thinking internals but maybe a bigger turbo or even just a tune of my current set up to get the most out of it. I can tell you for a fact i will not go to a place like this. I've had this type of experience a few times before where a "big" company take complete disregard for its customers. Its not hard to just stay in contact with someone. And for a professional, a quality build should be easy without issue. And tuning or rolling road time should also be easy. Iv had 5 cars remapped and all were all in good time. i think garage d will go on my avoid list. sorry to hear about your problems OP maybe try elsewhere next time.
Very rarely do I have to come on here to defend myself but when lies are facts are being twisted it brings up the true meaning of '2 sides to every story'. Yes we rebuilt the engine as a terrible job had been done in the first place, after the rebuild (within promised timescale) we seriously advised on rolling road check/mapping as we had run it in............After time the car was collected with numerous advisories. After collection as mentioned above the Power FC/rev limit messed about by owner/friends in the claim of "running it in at 3000rpm" whilst on the limiter resulting in a 'broken' rocker and as a result the car is here in good mechanical order awaiting mapping as Tune4Performance who's rolling road we use is closed temporarily since last week due to family matters. Rather than speculating please contact us directly on 01923 251588 or: info@garage-d.com Julian
In fairness Garage d weren't given the opportunity to deal with it prior to it becoming a public matter, seems a little unfair to let this carry on when it's being dealt with directly.
