I own a 2002 Husaberg FC 550. I had some problems with it, and since there isn't a Husaberg dealership in the area I took the bike to Coot's to be fixed. It needed some clutch work, timing adjustment, and jetting changes. The owner assured me that his 40+ years of motorcycle repair work would make fixing my bike a breeze. I dropped it off at his shop on August 18th, 2012. For the first three months I called him about once every two weeks to see how work was progressing. He said several times that although it was hard to find parts, he was confident that he could get it working. After three months, towards the end of November, the owner stopped answering his work and home phones. I assumed that there was some explanation for this, and didn't think much of it, even though he had had the bike for about 4 months at that point. He continued to ignore my bi-weekly phone calls until the middle of March, 2013. At that point he made some excuse about having been busy babysitting his 12 and 15 year old granddaughters, and told me that that was why he hadn't answered my calls for FOUR MONTHS. I smelled a rat, and requested that he finish the bike before the end of May. He assured me that he would, if I could just pay him $500 for the parts he had to purchase. At this point I was quite exasperated, and desperate to get the bike back. I dropped off the money three days later, and called him a week later to check up on things. No Answer!!! I called him 12 times over the next month and a half, trying to get him to contact me and tell me how things were going. In the middle of May, he called me up with some bogus story about how he had been working in the garden outside of his shop for the last 6 weeks and didn't realize that I had called. When I asked him when he expected the bike to be done, he told me that he had decided that the bike couldn't be fixed, and that I should come pick it up.
I set up an appointment for the next day( Sunday, May 18th) to pick it up, but had to cancel because the trailer I was planning on using was broken. He was fine with that, and we made another appointment for the 19th to pick it up after the trailer was fixed. It took longer than expected, and I had to postpone until the 20th to get it. When I called him on the 20th to call and tell him that I was on my way to pick it up, he sounded drunk. He immediately accused me of abusing his wife(who I had never met, and had spoken to on only two occasions, both times only to ask if Coot was available to speak with me.) When I responded by telling him that I hadn't, he changed his tune and began berating me for "jerking him around for three days" because i had rescheduled my pickup time twice. I angrily responded that I had been waiting for NINE MONTHS at that point, and his drunken frustration was nothing compared to my own frustration. He grew quiet after that, and said he would meet me at his shop. When I arrived, I saw that the bike was halfway disassembled, gas tank off, plastics off, and generally looking like crap. He had also flattened the brand new front tire by clamping it too tightly into his bike stand. After I loaded the bike onto the trailer, he told me that the $500 he had paid me would be sufficient payment, and that he was sorry that he couldn't fix it. Did I mention that he was falling down drunk at this time? At 3:00 PM on a FUCKING MONDAY?? I left, absolutely incensed, and took it home. As I reassembled the bike, I noticed that the CDI coil was hanging, unrestrained, from the side of the motor. The bolts are still MIA. read more
