Afordabelle's Garage

Well we got our rod out of the hands of the rip off artist and are not real happy with the results but are dealing with it. Anyone reading this if you have any idea of how to get one of these rip off artists to pay let me know. This guy kept baiting us every month making us think it was the last leg and finally we said enough is enough after giving him $76,000. Now we have issues with the car that should never appear on a car that was built for that kind of money and that’s all labor that does not count the parts which we paid for ourselves. This guy actually had the balls to write an appraisal for this car for $168,000 which if any of you looked at this car when we got it out of his shop you would laugh your butt off at this appraisal. I mean the car looks sharp in pictures but for a man that nit-picked everything the previous man did should be ashamed to put out a product like this. Major engine leak, fuel issues, wiring issues, hoses routed dangerously and unprotected, electrical components installed wrong and don’t work or short out, the list goes on and is documented. Mind you this $76K does not even include the interior. Anyone reading this if you have any idea how to help us get to the right people or whatever we need to go after this guy we would appreciate the help. We live in Upper Michigan but we need to take the car somewhere that someone will actually make us a timeline of how long it would be estimated the actual building of this car should have taken. This car was already built once and this was a re-do. We have all the documentation and pictures up to certain points in the timeline. This guy supplied a number of hours each month but no detail on what they did for those hours (2,108 of which some are double billed). The car appearance didn’t change at all in most months that he charged for many hours and this is when we started asking many questions. Wiring and the final body paint and assembly we were billed the largest portion of the money mounting to approximately $50K. This job we were told in the beginning would be $20-$40 range and it hit $76K and would have gone higher if we hadn’t pulled the car. We did not take the car back for any repairs to work already done as the same day we tried to pick the car up we had to return it for a fueling problem and the guy charged us $500 more to re-do it and still the issue wasn’t fixed. Bearing in mind this car was stripped down to the bare frame by this shop and rebuilt up fixing so called flaws this work was surely under shop warranty for their work so we thought. Turns out his word on shop warranty is no better than his word on the price of the job before tearing the car apart and ripping us along the build. All legit shops should be totally pissed at people like this guy! He is a disgrace to the honest hot rod builders and this man is a local business here in a small town. Gives a ton of credit to the phrase “shop local” especially when no other business locally will do anything to help get things righted. No thanks to the town of Shaffer, MI Lantagne’s Body Shop on shop local! This stuff needs to be exposed and we have no clue how to expose it. I am sure we are not the only couple that has gone through this.