Even though I insisted I was not going to call, I did call Dell at Egge Machine. He was very apolo­getic, was kind of put back when I explained the whole story again, and really did make every effort to appease me. He did tell me he would ship the shafts at no charge and would see to it as soon as we were off the phone. I’m not sure who Dell is, maybe man­age­ment or maybe just a con­cerned employee, but in any case Egge Machine would do well to clone him, if every­one oper­ated at his level I would never have had to go through this mess in the first place.….….. I do appre­ci­ate his efforts, and if it were not for him, this order would have been can­celed long ago and placed with some­one else. His efforts to rem­edy one screw-up after the next are appre­ci­ated, but the fact is this expe­ri­ance has left a very neg­a­tive impres­sion on me.….….Nuff said, and this time I really am done, I’m mov­ing on to other things and look­ing for­ward to our up-coming trip.

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I was away for the day out on Cape Cod and when I returned this evening lo and behold, there are two phone mes­sages from Steve over at Egge Machine. I guess their phones really do work!! Mes­sage one says he checked his notes and can find noth­ing refer­ring to the rocker arm shafts and that he can’t find the orig­i­nal list­ing on E-Bay that we were com­par­ing (the list­ing expired 9/3). He says that he does have the shafts and I could buy them and to let him know so that he can resolve this issue.…

Appa­rantly, it must have been really slow today, because he actu­ally called me back a sec­ond time to say that he would be out tomor­row and that I should speak to Dell when I called back, he would know what to do, and would be cov­er­ing for him. Good to know he is inter­ested in my well being and this rot­ten sit­u­a­tion, and I just feel so spe­cial get­ting two calls in the same day!! Might have been bet­ter if he had actu­ally called me when he promised to on Mon­day, but what the heck, he did get to it with­ing 48 hours, a far bet­ter record than what has hap­pened previously.….….…

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OK, OK, I know I said I was done with this, but my expe­dited order from Egge Machine that was shipped on 9/14 finally arrived late on Mon­day 9/21 strapped on the back of a tur­tle. Pretty much as I fig­ured, when we inven­to­ried the box yes­ter­day we found that they shipped +40 pis­tons as ordered but shipped stan­dard rings not the +40’s that we needed for assem­bly. Also, the rocker shafts were not on the pack­ing list or included with the order. Once again, I called them inquir­ing about the miss­ing shafts and while on the phone got a return autho­riza­tion for the rings shipped in error.

Talked to Steve again, and he was unable to re-call any­thing about the rocker arms but said he would check his notes and get back to me (not sure if he winked when he said it and it is not sur­pris­ing since I had placed this order 3 weeks ago!) I’m sure if he does man­age to return my call, which I seri­ously doubt, he’ll say we never talked about the rocker shafts, after all, why would I need those, I got new rocker arms, springs, guides, pushrods, lifters etc. and we could just pol­ish up the shafts.…What do you think? Well, here we are on the 23rd and still no phone call from them. That’s it, I sur­ren­der…Egge Machine you win, I give up, I’ll just get the shafts and rings locally and move on, I’m not call­ing them again.

Cus­tomer ser­vice is appar­ently not a pri­or­ity for these guys, or bet­ter yet, maybe in a cost cut­ting move they are not able to dial out on their phones, per­haps they are set to answer only.….….….……

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Time was sort this week, engine work is pro­gress­ing and the Egge Machine saga con­tin­ues to irri­tate me, but I did find some time to pull the tail-piece and replace the rear seal. I also pulled the pan and did a visual inspec­tion, it really looks clean as a whis­tle, with no debris in the fil­ter and the fluid looked great. Put it all back together with a new gas­ket and that’s going to be it until we get her run­ning and find out whether we have an issues or not. The engine block is ready to go, if the parts ever get here.……

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The Egge Machine saga con­tin­ues, we still have no parts as of this evening. I appre­ci­ate the fact that Dell finally picked up the ball and ran with it, get­ting my order together, BUT, they did promise to ship the parts expe­dited deliv­ery because of all of the prob­lems that occurred with the order AND they did promise to call me back to con­firm and insure that it did go out. So far all I have heard from these peo­ple is crick­ets chirping.….These peo­ple have yet to return even ONE of my phone calls, except for the one Dell made call­ing to tell me that he had arranged every­thing. I have had to call them at least a dozen times and no one ever calls me back, Cus­tomer Ser­vice at this Com­pany sim­ply does not exist.

Final thoughts: and I promise not to come back to this issue again as much as it really irri­tates me. Look­ing back, I could have ordered these same parts from Fal­con in Jack­sonville, Florida or Kan­ter in Boon­town, New Jer­sey and had my engine all together and back in the car by now. Mary Lee and I are going out of the Coun­try for 2 weeks, leav­ing Octo­ber 8 and these peo­ple have totally trashed my sched­ule. Now I will be lucky if this thing is back together by the 1st of Novem­ber!! I opted for Egge Machine based on rec­om­men­da­tions that the qual­ity of the parts would be bet­ter. So to sum it up, I was told they were ship­ping 9/14, my credit card was charged 9/14, no one called to con­firm ship­ping, no one called with a track­ing num­ber and so here I sit won­der­ing where the heck my stuff is.….unable to plan any kind of a sched­ule!! Based on this expe­ri­ence, I shud­der to think what is going to hap­pen when the box finally arrives ‚if the order is not com­plete or wrong in any respect, I may not get this project com­pleted until next year.…..BUYER BEWARE.….

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We began the process of tak­ing apart the rear end of the car today. Drums are off, brakes torn down and the axles are out so that we can replace the bear­ings and gas­kets before we put it all back together again. We also pulled apart the dif­fer­en­tial and are in the process of eval­u­at­ing it to deter­mine whether we need to do any­thing else, my guess is at the very min­i­mum, with it now apart we are going to replace the pin­ion bear­ing and seal. Only the axle tube itself is left in the car, but at the next oppor­tu­nity we will remove it along with the springs, ball joint and other sus­pen­sion parts so that we can get them cleaned and painted before we put them back.

On a side note, when we pulled the dif­fer­en­tial cover, the whole gear set came with it and that piece must weigh about 100 pounds. I think you could use this stuff in a dump truck with­out any trou­ble.….….. No won­der this beast weighs in at about 5,000 pounds.

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I know when I spoke with Dell at Egge Machine he said they would call me back Tues­day morn­ing, but I called them this after­noon and they did con­firm that the pis­tons were ground and being shipped today, so hope­fully this week is going to be a lot bet­ter than the last one was. After all, this is sup­posed to be a fun relax­ing project, not one that causes an ulcer.

This after­noon I also ordered a stain­less steel brake and fuel line set from In Line Tube along with some clips. Look­ing for­ward to them arriv­ing so that we can pro­ceed. This week I hope to get the rear axle out, the last dri­v­e­line com­po­nent we will have to deal with. Once this is done and re-installed, we will have a like new rolling chassis.…

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Mary Lee was spend­ing the day with her Mom, so I had some free time and went over to the shop to paint some of the engine parts before we began to assem­ble it. I went through the trou­ble of order­ing some Bill Hirsch high tem­per­a­ture primer through Cooper’s Auto Parts and so the saga begins again, both of the cans are bad. I did every­thing I could to get them to spray, all to no avail. I cleaned the valves, warmed the cans, but they would spray for less than a sec­ond and then plug up repeat­edly. Oh well, it is not worth send­ing them back, so in the trash they go, this stuff sure was not up to the stan­dards of any Bill Hirsch paints I’ve used in the past. I finally had to go out and get some new primer at a local out­let and was able to prime and fin­ish paint the oil pan, tim­ing cover, valve cov­ers and dip­stick tube

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