Then of course the camera ran out of battery juice, so I was only able to get one more picture. I've since removed the upper cab section again. With another hour of fussing and mudding, and it will be done. The bodywork on the main cab seems to be moving along at a good clip
It has come out pretty well and I am very confident that the seal between the two main cab sections will be really good, perhaps, dare I suggest, even better than "factory"
Tomorrow and the next day I will try to finish up the work on the cab. I'm concurrently helping the painter with prepping a paint room, and it looks like round 2, ding-ding!, of epoxy primer in a couple of days. If the sheet metal looks decent after that, then it will mean a scuff of #320 and into finish paint. Can you believe it?!
I'm going with a base/clear system, using PPG's top line of urethane paint. I don't want to bother with cheap paint - after all the hours of labor and costly body work materials, it would be unwise, IMO, to skimp on the paint.
in other news, my recent SOR order arrived today, and now i have my new wiper motor. I'm still working on locating a new wiper relay.
Further, there's my dealings with 4x4Labs...
(!warning, whining ahead..)
First let me say that I love the products they make. Their business practices, well, so far anyhow, do not impress. To re-cap: I talked with the proprietor Luke Porter, about a set-up for my truck several months back, and he said he could supply a system for me. Done deal. $600 later, then $90 in duties, the package of knuckle arms, TRE's, tie rod and relay rod arrived. All looked well made and beefy, which I liked. The knuckle arms were configured wrongly however, as I detailed previously in this thread. I called them and after a week of phone tag, missed messages, w.h.y., Luke told me that "a mistake had been made" and that they would send me a different set of knuckle arms ASAP. Fine. Three weeks later and another $50 or so in duties, the replacement knuckle arms arrived. Trouble was, they were identical to the first set and therefore, again, NFG for my set up. I called them up again (well, it took 3 or 4 calls actually), this time to learn that there had been a "mistake in the shipping department", and that he would bend up the correct type of knuckle arms for my the following Monday morning, that he had a special jig made for just that, blah, blah, blah. Okey-dokey, not the end of the world after all. I could wait some more.
And so I waited for the third set of arms to arrive. After three weeks, nothing, and then I came home to a phone message a day or two ago, from Luke's wife, explaining that the new (and
hopefully correct) knuckle arms had been "sitting there for the past three weeks", waiting I learned, for the return of the knuckle arms they had already sent to me previously. This was a precondition of shipment - no one there, however, had ever made any mention that I had to send the old ones back before they would ship the new ones. So, not only had the new knuckle arms been sitting there for three weeks, no one at the company thought to contact me about it, and to add to the fun they also wanted to charge me a further $275, on my credit card, so they could get them into the mail for me "right away".
While it is perfectly reasonable, as I'm sure most would agree, for a company to have such a practice with warranty issues and returns like this, it was less than stellar that they made no effort to inform me of the policy, all the while I am waiting for the product at the same time, with no knowledge of the new policy. After having received the second set of knuckle arms, with no comments from Luke about returning the old ones, I thought that they were simply trusting folks who were doing their best to satisfy the customer. In fact, I had asked Luke about returning the old arms in a previous conversation, and he said we would worry about that later, or something to that effect. I thought that was good of him (after all, it's nice to be shown trust), however I guess a few people have not returned the old parts to them, so they have been burned and thus the new policy - ahem, the new "secret" policy.
Of course, once I return the old knuckle arms to them, they will refund my $275, however at this point I have little to no confidence that they will even remember to do that, and I expect that I'll be calling them up again to bug them about it. For now I'm holding onto the old arms (2 sets) until the new set arrives, just in case there is another problem, and fingers are crossed that it will work out. Please pray for me.
Anyhow, 4x4Labs is, in my estimation, a company with nice products, and nice people, however this episode has given me a strong impression of sloppy and disorganized business practice. It's now over three months since i started this process with them, over $1000 later, and I sure would like to get the truck onto its front wheels
at some point in the NEAR future. I'm really glad that HJ47 is not my daily driver after such a wait - can you imagine?!
I hope they get their act together and continue to grow their business as they are a real asset to the LC community - I definitely wish them all the best.
-rant over-
