I had a head done for my 97 civic a few years back, and had a great experience; they were quick and…read morethe head was in great shape. I rebuilt that head myself, I just needed the surface work done.
I had a totally different experience this time, with the heads for my Mazda CX-9. I was initially told it could probably just be cleaned, milled, and vacuum tested, which was fine, but the valves ended up being bent; I expected that, and have no problem with that. I told them to go ahead and order the parts for the rebuild and brought the cams and caps later. I explained to them at the time that I did have a little bit of a rush on it.
About a week later, I called and asked for a status, and was told they'd be ready early the next week; the heads were done and they were just waiting on parts. No problem.
However, the following Monday when I called just to see if the parts had arrived, I was told that because I called too often, they were going to push it back to Friday. I told them that would put me in a bind, and was in turn told that was what happens to customers who call too often. I had even apologized for being impatient when I asked, so the response was really rude and unnecessary.
I stopped in to pick up my parts to do the work myself, because of the time constraint I was in. The guy was relatively polite this time and brought the heads to me, then dumped all the remaining parts into boxes to hand to me. I was charged for two hours labor for the cleaning and milling, then was told mine would have been next on the list.
Upon getting home, I ordered parts to complete the rebuild. However, upon inspection, the heads were not ready for a rebuild. There were scratches on the head surface, presumably from being drug off the shelf, I'm not sure. They were not coated in any protectant or oil. There was a piece of tape over a screw hole, covering a lot of really bad scratching. The tappets had water in them and rusted inside, and the cams were not oiled and covered in surface rust (all in attached pictures). When I turned the head over, piles of metal dust fell onto my table.
The exhaust guides on one of the heads all had what appeared to be threading in them; I'm not sure what that's about. I don't know if that was damage from before or if they were planning on pulling them when they rebuilt the heads, but the old matching exhaust valves did not have damage matching the valve guides. If they were planning on replacing the valve guides, I assume they'd have removed the old ones before cleaning the heads.
In all, definitely the worst experience I've had in a long time. They're very widely used and highly recommended by other shops, so this was very much a surprise to me. I will not recommend them to anyone and would advise anyone to steer clear of them.
