Some shops are outright dishonest, and others are simply not competent in doing the work they claim they can do.

Examples:

Dishonest: Shop A charged me extra for honing w/ torque plate, only to find out from Shop B that does my block work now that there was no way the last hone job used a plate. As the current shop owner said: "They may have placed a torque plate on the block, but they sure as He11 didn't tighten it down. The only way the bores measured round was without a plate and they distorted as soon as we actually put ours on prepping it for the hone."

And it turned out they couldn't get my already-.060" over block to clean up properly w/ the plate installed, so they just did a touch-up w/o the plate. Sometimes you just gotta run it as it is.

Dishonest: Shop C offers a nice used carb for sale describing it as "dyno tested" and "ready to bolt on". I bought it, and upon tearing it down to find out how it had been set up found a number of setup issues that told me if it had actually been "dyno tested" it surely didn't run worth a sh!t. And anything can be "ready to bolt on" as long as you assume that phrase doesn't actually mean "And it's going to run right", too.

I called that shop and spoke to the owner and called bogus on his ad's description. He admitted he'd taken it as a trade and "somebody else could have messed with it since we tuned it". Oh, and his backup line was "It's got a 30-day warranty." What I also figured out about that particular shop's work is they weren't capable of properly fixing this particular carburetor. So, IMO, they're both dishonest AND incompetent. I ended up working w/ the carb manufacturer to correct some issues and fixed it on my own, rather than bother sending it back to those clowns.



EDIT: I'm not ANGRY about all this, but I do have LONG memory.