These Are Your Worst Mechanic Rip-Off Stories

My POS Dodge Shadow decided to overheat due to a crack in the thermostat. Me, being the complete idiot 18-year-old I was at the time, was stuck in a Piggly Wiggly parking lot and needed to get home. So, I went inside, bought two jugs of distilled water, and did what I thought I was supposed to do – and dumped all of that water straight into the radiator. I then wondered why the car was making all that racket when I started it back up.

I had a friend drive me home, and had it towed to my usual mechanic the next day, where I learned what exactly a “warped head” is, how it happened, and how it was beyond that particular shop’s scope of work. They referred some trusted local mechanics to me, but hearing the estimates from each nearly caused me to have a panic attack. Then my uncle, upon hearing of my plight from my grandparents (who I lived with at the time), had a solution! He knew a guy. Of course he did. And this guy worked on cars and was cheap. Not only that, he had a whole engine that he’d swap into the car for $600.

And look, I may have been an idiot back then, but I wasn’t a complete moron. I knew this was probably a shady deal. I assumed (and was correct) that this guy probably owed my uncle money or drugs or whatever. But I was desperate, I needed to get to work and to classes. So I dropped my car off at, at least on the outside, looked like a legit mechanic business, he had a sign and everything! (“Earl’s Easy Auto Repair”, I shit you not.) And, sure, he was a lanky, toothless good-ol’-boy, but most wrenchers around these here parts look that way. A week later, he called and said it was ready.

I barely got a mile before I turned around and brought it back. The throttle and brake pedals were all jacked up, it idled horribly, and just all-around drove like crap. He hemmed and hawed, saying how it was a used engine and it “wasn’t gonna drive like new”. I said look, the car had nearly 200K miles on it, of course I didn’t expect that, but I at least needed it to be driveable. He took it back and a few days later he said it was sorted out. I picked it up, and while it was better, it still wasn’t driving all that great.

I took it to my usual mechanic to have them give it a once over. He called me into the lift bay to have me look at something. “See that dent on the oil pan?” he said. “That was on your old engine. I remember it. This is the same engine. Looks like maybe the head is different, but that’s it.” I was mad but, well, at least the head was different, so it was fixed, right?

A month later, it shot a rod through the block.

I’m not sure if it was damage from the initial overheating event, or something that Earl did, but now the engine was toast.

A friend of my mom’s suggested some well-known locals that dealt in Mopar stuff, and I visited one of their yards. They didn’t have a 2.5L like my vehicle, but they did have a 2.2 that they’d let go dirt cheap, $300. Also, he had a nephew, who was my age and was just starting to do his own engine work. I called him up and he said he’d do the swap for another $300. So, I spent another $600 to have another engine swap – hopefully this time for real. Again, the car didn’t run great – there were a lot of idle issues that, to his credit, the kid tried to chase down, but it was probably ECU or vacuum related and he neither had the time, nor did I have the extra money to keep going. I resigned to just drive the car as-is and look for something else.

Two months later, I totaled the car. Thank God.

That whole experience solidified my resolve to learn as much as I could about vehicle repair, to do as much as I could myself. I’ve had more positive experiences than bad, and the bad ones have mostly been general ineptitude rather than feeling like I was getting ripped off.

If you remove an engine from a car, then put it back in, is it legally a swap? How much of the engine has to be changed for it to count? The Dodge of Theseus, here.