Scott's Transmissions

[floridaZ]

I thought I had posted this up before... but I couldn't find the thread. Anyway, there was a development I thought worth mentioning so here we go again.

So I have an 84 auto, and the transmission was starting to slip. I decided to get a rebuild so I started looking around local at some of the shops. I wanted to keep the money local, and if a problem arose I didn't want to have to be going back and forth to Orlando/Tampa. So I happened along Scott's Transmissions, which operates out of a Quonset hut in Auburndale off of 92. Despite the... "rural" outward appearance that stuff in Auburndale tends to have, inside it looked like a pretty good operation and the owner seemed to be knowledgeable.

So I decide this would be a good place to freshen up the transmission to match the rebuilt motor, taking care of all the mechanical issues so I could focus on the little finishing details of the car's refresh. The car had 16X,XXX miles on it when I had the transmission rebuilt (I'm thinking 164,000 miles, but I'll have to hold off on that until I can find my file with service records to find the exact mileage). So I drop the car off for about 10 days so that it could be worked on. The pickup date was on a school day, so my father went by himself to pick up the car with my grandmother, who knows nothing about cars really.

Needless to say a loud exhaust and a cam don't help a person with little seat time and a person with little automotive knowledge notice when something is wrong. I arrived home shortly before my father came back in the Vette, and as soon as it entered the driveway we could tell that something was wrong with it. There was a knock. That weekend we popped the engine open and discovered three metal objects in two of the cylinders. The cylinder walls were scored (not terribly), the head had some bad pitting, one of the pistons had mild damage, and one valve was pretty bad shape.

We think about it and can't get over the fact that one needs to remove the CFI intake box in order to access the transmission bolts. Or the fact that there isn't much to stop something like a nut from getting into the engine with that removed. Or the fact that there was no knocking in the motor prior to having it rebuilt.

Needless to say my father called up the shop with some heartily-chosen words for him. He claimed that the motor must have been knocking prior to it being delivered to his shop. Considering that it had enough miles on it to drive from the house to the shop and back 3 times put on it while in his care I would have hoped that, had that been the case, he would have at least noticed something was wrong. If not immediately stop and call us to tell us about this. Or stopped my father as he was leaving the shop. Either way, if we dropped it in then I'm a tard cause I can't find anywhere i am missing 3 bolts/nuts of that size.

Anyway, we put the motor back together sans metal particles so we can move it around the yard. Surprisingly, the car still ran okay. We pull it out of the garage and... surprise! The transmission is leaking. At first we thought it was oil from the spot in the garage, but when we jacked it up we couldn't find anything leaking off of the engine. When we moved it to wash it we checked the oil and decided that it was transmission fluid.

Well, this can't possibly get any worse, so **** it, we drive the car back up to the shop to have them fix whatever is wrong with the transmission. And a second time. We gave up after the 3rd. In Scott's Trans' defense, it leaked a lot less after so much bonding time with him, but it still leaked some. I wasn't able to track down the culprit, but I father figured out that it was the drain plug. We tightened it down, replaced the plug, ran a tap through the threads to make sure all that was straight. We never figured it out so we eventually just got in the habit on checking the level regularly.

So eventually we replace the heads and internals, bored out the cylinders to get rid of all the damage. It seemed to shift okay and the motor was running fine and dandy, so I just drove it. As a matter of fact, it has been my daily driver recently.

Well, at least until Friday the 11th. It's worth noting that I checked the fluid levels that Monday and everything was where it should have been, but the car was only drove on that Wednesday and that Friday. Current mileage sits at about 172,000; and I didn't do anything stupid to the car on Wednesday or Friday.

well, It's 1am and I'm on I4 heading home from work, everything is working just the way it should be. Then I decide to pass a car, so at 75mph I get in the left lane and press the gas. Nothing. I could maintain speed but I could (and tried) revving to 4,000 rpm and it didn't do anything. Well I hop in the right hand lane and just chill all the way home. Getting off of the interstate the transmission was okay until I hit 30mph, and then it would start slipping. I was able to get it up to 55 and limp home.

Well, next day I know the thing is busted, and after my dad drives it down the road to test it since I apparently don't know what a slipping transmission feels like, I check the fluid. It smells all burnt, and upon further inspection it was 3/4 quart low.

Anyway, as I said in my original post maybe it is all some fluke and maybe my experience doesn't represent what will happen to anyone who goes there. The debris in the motor might have been dropped in by his hired help. The word is that he has fired a few people there... but the word is also that my experience (the transmission part, not the motor) is not really out of he ordinary and I can't cite specifics on any of it.

But I can tell my story, and I can attest that there aren't any oil spots in the parking lot at SSR or in my yard. I can state that it is my opinion that this shop banged up my motor rebuilding a transmission, then drove it further than one needs to test to see if a transmission if functioning properly. And I can state that it is my opinion that the transmission they built blew out a seal, or whatever stopgap they used to "fix" that leak on the highway, causing it to run out of oil and just die before I could even get 10,000 miles out of it.

It would be my advice to steer clear of Scott's Transmissions if at all possible. Especially if you have a Corvette, and even more so if that Corvette's intake would be easy to drop a bolt into.