"Shifty" Shifted Performance: My experience.
04-09-2012, 05:43 PM
#1
"Shifty" Shifted Performance: My experience.
Hey guys!
Whelp, I’m back! A lot of you know me from my Toyota 350z build that has been going on for quite a few months now. The build was something that I have been dreaming about for about 3 years now and I finally saved up enough cash to make that dream come true....well it turned into a nightmare VERY quick.
I guess I can start out by telling you guys how I met the guys out at shifted performance and why I went to them in the first place. I was on the supra forums researching what I would need to buy to get my project going, talking to different guys about motors, turbo's, tuning, etc....I got a lot of PM's from guys, giving me lots of good info about who to talk to and so on. Then I got a PM from a guy saying that he had a shop in NJ, and had been doing 2jz swap kits for RX7's for a little while now, he sent me some pictures of the cars and talked my ear off about everything he does and would offer over the kit I was going to buy (tech 2)...I was very sketchy at first but left him in the back of my mind...a year and a half later, he was still emailing me and sending pictures and so forth, sooo I decided to go out to the shop, look around and see about leaving my car there...
In late September 2011, I decided to take a ride out with a few friends and potentially drop the car off...got there, loved the few builds he showed me and the deal he was cutting me didn’t seem all that bad. He offered me a sponsorship that would include his kit, paint and wiring harness for free. A discounted labor rate of 4,000.00, and a safe place for my car for the winter. We discussed when the car would be done and what all I wanted on it. He told me that he wanted my car "to be a model of what kind of work he could REALLY do"...he wanted my car to be his company’s money maker in a way. He promised me a car that would be a reliable everyday driver with all the same qualities of a brand new car (A/C, Nav, all new gauges, reliable, all brand new parts, clips, wiring, the whole 9 yards) everything looked legit, Tony seemed professional, and I was happy when I left my 2006 350z there.
A few months went by and Tony seemed to be FLYING thru the build, I received pictures every day, a phone call every night giving me details of what all he had done that day, what he planned on doing and so forth…I was so excited to get the car back…we had talked about the car being done around Christmas time and most definitely done before the New Year….wellll that didn’t happen…this is where I started to get a little worried …BUT, when I brought it up to Tony he would simply say “Travis, I told you in the beginning, you can trust me..it’s going to be done and done the right way”…so I gave him a few more months…then March came and I was seeing little to no work being done, and when I did see work, it was not good work…like when he finally got it to run, he sent videos of it driving around at night so you could not see if it was blowing smoke or anything (I found out later that he had the APEXI Safc 2 wired in backwards and it was DUMPING fuel and running REALLY unsafely) he called one day and said he hooked the intercooler piping up and my turbo (that was on my VQ and ran just fine), blew up under only 2PSI…he couldn’t get it to run correctly, (we found out was because it was wired backwards)and it took him 3 weeks to mount my new GT4088R….Finally, I gave him a call and said I would be there in 2 weeks from that day…it would be a Friday and I was going to be taking the car…I could not have it sitting there any longer…he said ok…I felt 2 weeks was PLENTY of time to tune the car and have it ready for me to pick it up…3 DAYS BEFORE I WENT TO GET IT, I called and he STILL had not touched it…said he lost track of time….I simply said, ILL BEE THERE FRIDAY…sooo that Thursday night when I called him, it still was not running…he said it just needed tuned and it would be fine…so I took my tuner with me to Jersey. When myself and Josh from NSN Garage showed up on Friday morning we pulled up to me my car sitting in the front of the garage with the hood up, Tony standing in front of it…we got out and greeted each other then I said “let’s hear it run”…he immediately started saying “let’s check out the shop, look at this look at that…sooo after about 5 mins of that I said again, “let’s hear my car”…he couldn’t find the keys, so I had a set…tried to start it…NOTHING…he then said it was out of gas and that he had been having trouble keeping gas in it…the car held gas just fine when I dropped it off??? sooo we started pouring gas into the tank and to my surprise, it went in the filler and right out the bottom of the tank!!! (later found that he removed the fuel pump and never tightened the bolts holding the fuel pump basket down, he actually lost one of them and all the rest were less than hand tight)….we then began our 24 hr. tuning and fixing adventure…after hrs. of scratching our heads trying to figure out the fuel problem and the tuning issues, we found that the Safc2 had been wired in wrong, the alternator was bad, the alternator being bad drained my battery to the point that it would no longer hold a charge, the MAP sensor was bad, and my oil was flooded with gas….I bought new plugs, a new battery, fixed the gas leak and changed the oil…Josh got the Safc 2 to hold the car at about 14.5 A/F ratio and Tony replaced the alternator and map sensor. (this all happened between 7am Friday morning and midnight Friday night) we finally had the car ready for the trip home, running well…starting right up, driving up and down the street fine, back and forth to the gas station (about 3 miles)hit a little boost and the car never leaned out…things were good to go! I got into the car and turned on the radio to leave…NOTHING….he had removed all the wiring to the amps….sooo we were stuck there for ANOTHER hr.…Tony put all that back in and we then left for home…
On the way home we had to pull over to reattach my hood, because it almost came off…they had never tightened the hood down and my gauges all stopped working then would come on then stop and on and stop and on etc….and not to mention I had all the gauges wired into the dimmer switch so that at night they could be dimmed…tony rewired them into the radio so I had to put blue tape over most of them so I could see out the windshield…. Other than that, the car seemed to run fine the whole way home…got it home, put it in the garage so that we could go over it with a fine toothed comb the next day…
This is where it gets interesting…while we were there, we did not go over the car very well…we had one goal in mind and that was get it out of there…I never really looked at the paint (didn’t think I had to) never looked at anything except what was giving us problems….
Josh trying to figure out the wiring mess Shifted created
First thing we noticed after washing the car was all the body damage…a dent in the hood from where they were pushing on the front to latch it (kind of understandable but ehhh shouldn’t be there) my rear bumper was melted from where he was SOOOO pumped that he got the exhaust to sit so “tucked” against the body, numerous cracks in the front bumper, scratches on the fenders from not using fender covers and gouges in the rear passenger side bumper.
here looks like they messed up the CF and tried to repare it:
Whelp, I’m back! A lot of you know me from my Toyota 350z build that has been going on for quite a few months now. The build was something that I have been dreaming about for about 3 years now and I finally saved up enough cash to make that dream come true....well it turned into a nightmare VERY quick.
I guess I can start out by telling you guys how I met the guys out at shifted performance and why I went to them in the first place. I was on the supra forums researching what I would need to buy to get my project going, talking to different guys about motors, turbo's, tuning, etc....I got a lot of PM's from guys, giving me lots of good info about who to talk to and so on. Then I got a PM from a guy saying that he had a shop in NJ, and had been doing 2jz swap kits for RX7's for a little while now, he sent me some pictures of the cars and talked my ear off about everything he does and would offer over the kit I was going to buy (tech 2)...I was very sketchy at first but left him in the back of my mind...a year and a half later, he was still emailing me and sending pictures and so forth, sooo I decided to go out to the shop, look around and see about leaving my car there...
In late September 2011, I decided to take a ride out with a few friends and potentially drop the car off...got there, loved the few builds he showed me and the deal he was cutting me didn’t seem all that bad. He offered me a sponsorship that would include his kit, paint and wiring harness for free. A discounted labor rate of 4,000.00, and a safe place for my car for the winter. We discussed when the car would be done and what all I wanted on it. He told me that he wanted my car "to be a model of what kind of work he could REALLY do"...he wanted my car to be his company’s money maker in a way. He promised me a car that would be a reliable everyday driver with all the same qualities of a brand new car (A/C, Nav, all new gauges, reliable, all brand new parts, clips, wiring, the whole 9 yards) everything looked legit, Tony seemed professional, and I was happy when I left my 2006 350z there.
A few months went by and Tony seemed to be FLYING thru the build, I received pictures every day, a phone call every night giving me details of what all he had done that day, what he planned on doing and so forth…I was so excited to get the car back…we had talked about the car being done around Christmas time and most definitely done before the New Year….wellll that didn’t happen…this is where I started to get a little worried …BUT, when I brought it up to Tony he would simply say “Travis, I told you in the beginning, you can trust me..it’s going to be done and done the right way”…so I gave him a few more months…then March came and I was seeing little to no work being done, and when I did see work, it was not good work…like when he finally got it to run, he sent videos of it driving around at night so you could not see if it was blowing smoke or anything (I found out later that he had the APEXI Safc 2 wired in backwards and it was DUMPING fuel and running REALLY unsafely) he called one day and said he hooked the intercooler piping up and my turbo (that was on my VQ and ran just fine), blew up under only 2PSI…he couldn’t get it to run correctly, (we found out was because it was wired backwards)and it took him 3 weeks to mount my new GT4088R….Finally, I gave him a call and said I would be there in 2 weeks from that day…it would be a Friday and I was going to be taking the car…I could not have it sitting there any longer…he said ok…I felt 2 weeks was PLENTY of time to tune the car and have it ready for me to pick it up…3 DAYS BEFORE I WENT TO GET IT, I called and he STILL had not touched it…said he lost track of time….I simply said, ILL BEE THERE FRIDAY…sooo that Thursday night when I called him, it still was not running…he said it just needed tuned and it would be fine…so I took my tuner with me to Jersey. When myself and Josh from NSN Garage showed up on Friday morning we pulled up to me my car sitting in the front of the garage with the hood up, Tony standing in front of it…we got out and greeted each other then I said “let’s hear it run”…he immediately started saying “let’s check out the shop, look at this look at that…sooo after about 5 mins of that I said again, “let’s hear my car”…he couldn’t find the keys, so I had a set…tried to start it…NOTHING…he then said it was out of gas and that he had been having trouble keeping gas in it…the car held gas just fine when I dropped it off??? sooo we started pouring gas into the tank and to my surprise, it went in the filler and right out the bottom of the tank!!! (later found that he removed the fuel pump and never tightened the bolts holding the fuel pump basket down, he actually lost one of them and all the rest were less than hand tight)….we then began our 24 hr. tuning and fixing adventure…after hrs. of scratching our heads trying to figure out the fuel problem and the tuning issues, we found that the Safc2 had been wired in wrong, the alternator was bad, the alternator being bad drained my battery to the point that it would no longer hold a charge, the MAP sensor was bad, and my oil was flooded with gas….I bought new plugs, a new battery, fixed the gas leak and changed the oil…Josh got the Safc 2 to hold the car at about 14.5 A/F ratio and Tony replaced the alternator and map sensor. (this all happened between 7am Friday morning and midnight Friday night) we finally had the car ready for the trip home, running well…starting right up, driving up and down the street fine, back and forth to the gas station (about 3 miles)hit a little boost and the car never leaned out…things were good to go! I got into the car and turned on the radio to leave…NOTHING….he had removed all the wiring to the amps….sooo we were stuck there for ANOTHER hr.…Tony put all that back in and we then left for home…
On the way home we had to pull over to reattach my hood, because it almost came off…they had never tightened the hood down and my gauges all stopped working then would come on then stop and on and stop and on etc….and not to mention I had all the gauges wired into the dimmer switch so that at night they could be dimmed…tony rewired them into the radio so I had to put blue tape over most of them so I could see out the windshield…. Other than that, the car seemed to run fine the whole way home…got it home, put it in the garage so that we could go over it with a fine toothed comb the next day…
This is where it gets interesting…while we were there, we did not go over the car very well…we had one goal in mind and that was get it out of there…I never really looked at the paint (didn’t think I had to) never looked at anything except what was giving us problems….
Josh trying to figure out the wiring mess Shifted created
First thing we noticed after washing the car was all the body damage…a dent in the hood from where they were pushing on the front to latch it (kind of understandable but ehhh shouldn’t be there) my rear bumper was melted from where he was SOOOO pumped that he got the exhaust to sit so “tucked” against the body, numerous cracks in the front bumper, scratches on the fenders from not using fender covers and gouges in the rear passenger side bumper.
here looks like they messed up the CF and tried to repare it:
04-09-2012, 05:44 PM
#2
….then we looked at the engine….we started looking at how he had ran everything for the turbo coolant lines because it was all a cluster right in front of the turbo so you couldn’t run an intake (had to fab up a weird ugly intake to drive around) soo after looking at all of that we noticed something odd!...both, the “IN” and “OUT” lines to the turbo were ran off the same water neck, RIGHT BESIDE EACHOTHER!! Now, I am no genius, BUT, how does that properly flow coolant to the turbo??? I look at it and think its kind of like sucking and blowing through a straw at the same time…after opening it up, OF COURSE, there is an air lock in there…the turbo wasn’t getting proper coolant!!!! (that would most likely be why y old turbo blew up…he was running it without in intercooler pipes attached and it was spooling like crazy with no back pressure…then when it finally did get a little boost, BOOM, bearings went out…)
After we found that, we kept looking….didn’t take long to find the A&N fittings were all loose (less than hand tight) on the oil catch can, there is no vacuum hooked to the catch can, AND the fittings from the catch can to the valve cover were cross threaded AND JB welded into the valve cover (one sides JB Weld didn’t hold up and you can pull it right out of the cover…)
NONE of the vacuum lines were hooked up to the Waste gate, the lines ran to the boost controller were just hanging under the dash and the one going to the BOV was VERY loose…
The radiator hose crossing in front of the cam gears was actually hitting the gears! Instead of shaving a half inch off the hose, he just rested it against the plastic valve cover, cover…
If you stood back, and lines the motor up with the center of the car you could see that it is actually sitting in there crooked (tough to see in pics and you can’t tell on first look…but once you see it, it stands out like a sore thumb) (after further looking into this, we have to cut and re-weld the trans mount to fix it…BUT, NSN Garage is going to rebuild the mounts for me so I have ZERO affiliation with Shifted…)
After noticing the motor was crooked, we looked at the intercooler and of course…it sits higher on one end than the other…minor details he should have had perfect…
We started noticing on the drive that if you do not down shift through every gear when you come to a stop, 1st and 2nd gear seem to just disappear…not real sure of why this is happening yet (if anyone has any ideas, please let me know)
I now have to refill the power steering fluid every day, it didn’t leak before I dropped it off.
when I was at Shifted I never noticed but the “ceramic coating” on my manifold was slowly burning off….by the time I got home, it was all burnt off…soo I called Tony and asked him about it and he came clean and said it was sprayed with high heat paint…. (I was not charged for ceramic coating BUT I was told it was done)
we started looking at the Polish job (which was supposed to be chrome in the first place) that I paid over $400 for and I am EXTREAMLY upset with how it looks…parts are not done well…some parts not even touched, scratches in it and it honestly doesn’t even look shiny…and where he had the vacuum lines removed from the throttle body is very crappy looking…
The aluminum welds that I paid $75 per weld for have pin holes where the BOV is attached to the throttle body.
When you are inside the car, and you want to get out….GOOD LUCK! My properly working door is no longer working…you have to now put the window down and open the door from the outside because the inside handle no longer works
The horn is no longer working (haven’t hooked it up yet to find out why…but I am scared that it is due to the anti-theft…I REALLY pray that it isn’t just honking away…I will find out soon I guess
I was told that he was putting a metal head gasket in the car from Titan…after looking, its stock…
All the clips for the wiring harness were supposed to be replaced with new clips…all except 2 of the fuel injector clips are broken, and the clip going to the water temperature deal is broken…(that’s just the ones I have found so far)
We couldn’t figure out why the car had a miss…started pulling wires on the coils and found that the #6 coil was bad…
The like half inch vacuum line that is supposed to run from the intake to the little black box on the back of the intake manifold (donno the proper name for it) is not hooked up nor does it have a filter on it…
When the new turbo was mounted, it had to be twisted a little for it to fit in the bay…when he did this (he had 2 weeks to do it) he didn’t fix the down pipe to fit to it properly, so now I have an exhaust leak off the turbo, as well as when he put the turbo in, he smashed the brake line up against the water line on the side of the turbo…as the motor moves, it is wearing a hole in the brake line…
After we found that, we kept looking….didn’t take long to find the A&N fittings were all loose (less than hand tight) on the oil catch can, there is no vacuum hooked to the catch can, AND the fittings from the catch can to the valve cover were cross threaded AND JB welded into the valve cover (one sides JB Weld didn’t hold up and you can pull it right out of the cover…)
NONE of the vacuum lines were hooked up to the Waste gate, the lines ran to the boost controller were just hanging under the dash and the one going to the BOV was VERY loose…
The radiator hose crossing in front of the cam gears was actually hitting the gears! Instead of shaving a half inch off the hose, he just rested it against the plastic valve cover, cover…
If you stood back, and lines the motor up with the center of the car you could see that it is actually sitting in there crooked (tough to see in pics and you can’t tell on first look…but once you see it, it stands out like a sore thumb) (after further looking into this, we have to cut and re-weld the trans mount to fix it…BUT, NSN Garage is going to rebuild the mounts for me so I have ZERO affiliation with Shifted…)
After noticing the motor was crooked, we looked at the intercooler and of course…it sits higher on one end than the other…minor details he should have had perfect…
We started noticing on the drive that if you do not down shift through every gear when you come to a stop, 1st and 2nd gear seem to just disappear…not real sure of why this is happening yet (if anyone has any ideas, please let me know)
I now have to refill the power steering fluid every day, it didn’t leak before I dropped it off.
when I was at Shifted I never noticed but the “ceramic coating” on my manifold was slowly burning off….by the time I got home, it was all burnt off…soo I called Tony and asked him about it and he came clean and said it was sprayed with high heat paint…. (I was not charged for ceramic coating BUT I was told it was done)
we started looking at the Polish job (which was supposed to be chrome in the first place) that I paid over $400 for and I am EXTREAMLY upset with how it looks…parts are not done well…some parts not even touched, scratches in it and it honestly doesn’t even look shiny…and where he had the vacuum lines removed from the throttle body is very crappy looking…
The aluminum welds that I paid $75 per weld for have pin holes where the BOV is attached to the throttle body.
When you are inside the car, and you want to get out….GOOD LUCK! My properly working door is no longer working…you have to now put the window down and open the door from the outside because the inside handle no longer works
The horn is no longer working (haven’t hooked it up yet to find out why…but I am scared that it is due to the anti-theft…I REALLY pray that it isn’t just honking away…I will find out soon I guess
I was told that he was putting a metal head gasket in the car from Titan…after looking, its stock…
All the clips for the wiring harness were supposed to be replaced with new clips…all except 2 of the fuel injector clips are broken, and the clip going to the water temperature deal is broken…(that’s just the ones I have found so far)
We couldn’t figure out why the car had a miss…started pulling wires on the coils and found that the #6 coil was bad…
The like half inch vacuum line that is supposed to run from the intake to the little black box on the back of the intake manifold (donno the proper name for it) is not hooked up nor does it have a filter on it…
When the new turbo was mounted, it had to be twisted a little for it to fit in the bay…when he did this (he had 2 weeks to do it) he didn’t fix the down pipe to fit to it properly, so now I have an exhaust leak off the turbo, as well as when he put the turbo in, he smashed the brake line up against the water line on the side of the turbo…as the motor moves, it is wearing a hole in the brake line…
04-09-2012, 05:45 PM
#3
I think I have names the majority of everything we found on the first quick look over…so I sent Tony an email (if you want to see the email, PM me and I will gladly send you a copy) that was very professional…I did not bash him in any way..but told him all the issues I found…I asked that I could keep half of the labor charges because I felt the job was less than half way done…in return I wouldn’t bash his company and I would just fix the small problems it had…he quickly agrees and said sorry…so I got $2000.00 back…this was still a huge loss for me because just to have the body work alone fixed…I would be near that…BUT I didn’t want any trouble…
But now the greatest part!!!! As we were fixing the coil issue, we got it to run smooth!...no miss, no sounds, it was perfect!!! UNTIL you gave it a little throttle….then I wanted to cry…at around 2000 rpms you can hear rod knock….sooooo we immediately shut the motor down and that’s where I sit at the moment….$16,000.00ish dollars in a build that has all of these problems (and I assume even more that we will find during the rebuild) AND a motor that has rod knock…
I called Tony immediately and all he had to say was that it wasn’t his fault and that it was my fault that the motor was knocking…
So I told him that I needed some sort of help with this new issue and he would not answer me...i told him that I could not let anyone else go through the same as I have, and that I was going to make sure that that didn’t happen…so here I am telling you guys my experience so that you know what kind of quality of work Shifted is capable of.
missing nuts,
great shifter that was build for me:
how the power steering resevoir was held on...keeps falling off...had to zip tie it up
he had the nerve to sign the car "built with pride"
intercooler pipe rubbing
But now the greatest part!!!! As we were fixing the coil issue, we got it to run smooth!...no miss, no sounds, it was perfect!!! UNTIL you gave it a little throttle….then I wanted to cry…at around 2000 rpms you can hear rod knock….sooooo we immediately shut the motor down and that’s where I sit at the moment….$16,000.00ish dollars in a build that has all of these problems (and I assume even more that we will find during the rebuild) AND a motor that has rod knock…
I called Tony immediately and all he had to say was that it wasn’t his fault and that it was my fault that the motor was knocking…
So I told him that I needed some sort of help with this new issue and he would not answer me...i told him that I could not let anyone else go through the same as I have, and that I was going to make sure that that didn’t happen…so here I am telling you guys my experience so that you know what kind of quality of work Shifted is capable of.
missing nuts,
great shifter that was build for me:
how the power steering resevoir was held on...keeps falling off...had to zip tie it up
he had the nerve to sign the car "built with pride"
intercooler pipe rubbing
04-09-2012, 06:01 PM
#4
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Sorry to see man. Sometimes shops just don't care. I hope NSN can help you out. I know it's a labor of love and when someone else doesn't respect your baby, it's gotta hurt. But looking at some of the S*** they did here I'm curious as to what other cars they have screwed up.
The shifter is totally amateur! Like a payday welded to a snickers welded to a baby ruth!
I'm looking forward to a complete and satisfying results!!
The shifter is totally amateur! Like a payday welded to a snickers welded to a baby ruth!
I'm looking forward to a complete and satisfying results!!
Last edited by suprasam; 04-09-2012 at 06:06 PM.
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EJohn (11-17-2023)
04-09-2012, 06:09 PM
#7
I would have wanted to cry after all that work to see this is what was done. Prob cost half what you paid just to fix it now if you don't have to re-do everything that is. Good luck man sorry to hear about this.
I did LOL at the shifter but only cause I felt bad!
I did LOL at the shifter but only cause I felt bad!
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04-09-2012, 06:32 PM
#9
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I feel like I've read this same thread a million times before. Not trying to be callous and I hope you get all your issues resolved, but such a major job needs to be done by someone you already have a strong relationship with, either a stellar shop that you already have experience with, or yourself/trusted friends. These sorts of disastrous installs happen all the time. Everything starts out roses and ends up being trash.
Good luck getting it fixed and getting the financials figured out.
Good luck getting it fixed and getting the financials figured out.
04-09-2012, 06:51 PM
#10
Sux to see you paid $16,000 on your build and have nothing but problems. You left your z there back in September 2011.... that's plenty of time, a total unprofessional failure in my book and signing your engine bay with "built with pride" on it... 
And the shifter is PATHETIC
There's two side to every story and Tony got a lot of explaining to do...
I hope you'll get some of your money back op.
And the shifter is PATHETIC
There's two side to every story and Tony got a lot of explaining to do...
I hope you'll get some of your money back op.
04-09-2012, 07:07 PM
#11
Sux to see you paid $16,000 on your build and have nothing but problems. You left your z there back in September 2011.... that's plenty of time, a total unprofessional failure in my book and signing your engine bay with "built with pride" on it...
And the shifter is PATHETIC
There's two side to every story and Tony got a lot of explaining to do...
I hope you'll get some of your money back op.
And the shifter is PATHETIC
There's two side to every story and Tony got a lot of explaining to do...
I hope you'll get some of your money back op.
he did give me half off the labor as i stated in the origional post...but that was for not finishing the job...then after the rod bearings went i called again asking for him to atleast pay for the repairs...nope...
04-09-2012, 07:45 PM
#16
i would honestly love some explanation from Shifted...and i would be more than willing to try and work the whole thing out with them...but he said it wasnt his fault...and did not answer when i asked him for help...
he did give me half off the labor as i stated in the origional post...but that was for not finishing the job...then after the rod bearings went i called again asking for him to atleast pay for the repairs...nope...
he did give me half off the labor as i stated in the origional post...but that was for not finishing the job...then after the rod bearings went i called again asking for him to atleast pay for the repairs...nope...
