My 2003 Ford F350 with a 6.0 Diesel broke down on us 30 minutes from our campsite. We were dead in the water on a 102-degree day with my family and 3 dogs stuck on a 2 lane highway with zero cell coverage. Anyone who drives a Ford 6.0 knows they are ticking time bombs to break down at the worst possible time and mine kept the 6.0 tradition going. We were 5.5 hours from home at this point.
Luckily for us, there was one nearby home with a kind gentleman that allowed us to use his landline to call AAA. This is where Dale Adam's Custom Auto comes into play.
Not long after calling AAA, Daniel pulled and explained who he was and that AAA had contacted them. They were swift in getting my truck hauled to their shop and even made an attempt to give assistance in getting my 5th wheel camper to our campsite. This was well after their standard hours. We were fortunate that we had a very good friend nearby that was able to tow our rig to the campsite, so that wasn't needed. Custom Auto spent a good amount of time diagnosing the issue which I know can be tricky to track down especially on my Franken-engine of unknown various different model years.
I explained to Daniel that my engine was of unknown origin and consisted of various model year heads, block, and who knows what else. Ford has made many revisions over the years to this engine, so the parts are very year-specific. Daniel actually drove 1.5 hours to St. Louis on Saturday morning to acquire every possible combination of model year parts that usually fail on these things so they would have what they needed once they pinned down the culprit. Any unused part would of course be returned. Of course, my truck, as always, has the weird issue that isn't common so it didn't end up being any of the parts that normally fail on these trucks or any of the parts they picked up. Since they still didn't have the part that I needed in stock for my repair new and this would add another day of waiting to get me on the road, they took one off of their own F550 company truck in order to get mine running so that I could get my family, my dogs, and my camper home. Once the repair was complete, They drove the truck up and down the mountain twice to verify it was running well before even contacting me. Then Daniel picked me up from the campsite in my truck to bring me back to the shop to finalize things. I had some anxiety on the way back expecting a whopper of a bill due to the amount of time spent on my truck. I was blown away by the very reasonable rate and overall bill. The part was only billed at a fraction of the cost of a new one from Ford and the labor was very reasonable. If I had towed this to a Ford dealer as I originally wanted, the bill would have easily been triple or more.
If I lived closer, Custom Auto would have a customer for life. Perhaps if I have any big jobs planned for my 6.0 coming up, I'll make a camping trip out of it. However, hopefully, it will be a planned stop next time.
Thank you to the entire crew at Dale's Custom Auto! read more
