Trouble with KEP, Can't decide if I'm getting hosed Options

[aircooledboy]

Hey boys. Been lurking all these years, just no time to post.

I can't decide if Kennedy Engineered Products is screwing me, or if I'm being unreasonable. Here's my deal:
I've lost most of another short 914 driving season chasing down a clutch problem that turned out to be a broken diaphragm spring on my pressure plate. My driver is a 73 Renegade conversion with a SBC 350 V8. The pressure plate is about 5+ years old, Stage 2 from KEP, but only has 5000 miles max on (in a good year I might get to put 3000 on the car, it was in body work for 2+ years, and this year I was only able to put 200ish on it due to chasing said clutch issues). I called KEP last week and spoke to them, and ultimately decided just to have them send me a new pressure plate. They were willing to have me send them the broken unit and they would rebuild it, but no discount on a new one, and no credit for a core if I sent it to them in exchange for the new one. That pissed me off a little, but I wanted to drive my car before the beautiful fall weather was gone, so I bit the bullet and just had them send me a new one.

New plate arrives Friday, I'm pumped to get it slammed in Saturday morning, and enjoy probably the last warm weekend of the year in this part of the world. Get the car in the air, hold pressure plate up to fly wheel: IT'S THE WRONG FREAKING PLATE!!!! Grrrr. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/mad.gif) Looking at the plate and the packaging, it's a standard Sachs 914 pressure plate. Call KEP today, talk to the same guy, he says "there are 2 ways to set up that clutch", and that's why he sent me that part. Funny, he never told me that when I was giving him my credit card number. He never asked a single question about what size my pressure plate was.

I'm not sure he's not full of shiat when he says that some V8 conversions use a standard sized pressure plate, but more importantly, he tell's me that I will have to pay to ship the wrong part back, AND shipping to get the correct part shipped, AND they will charge me for the second pressure plate, not refunding the wrong one until they have received it. For those keeping score at home, I will have paid to ship a part THREE times (to the tune of about $100) that was sent out wrong through no fault of mine, and they not are giving me so much as 1 cent off the price of the new part to compensate me for nearly new pressure plate that failed after less than 5000 miles (trust me, you can tell by looking at the failed part, it has almost no wear).

I think I'm getting bent over, but sometimes I'm not sure I trust my perspective on stuff like this when I'm buried with other things in life. What say you?

[aircooledboy]

I agree they didn't owe me anything on the old part. I run my own business, and I always try to do something for a client when there is even a chance that they have a legitimate complaint about something, just to let them know their satisfaction is important to me. I also understand no one is required to run their business the way I do, so I try to be open minded about what is included on the spectrum of an "acceptable" way to deal with an issue like this. That's why I was putting this out there to see what you all thought.

I'm pretty pissed that they're nicking me 3 freakin' times to ship a part that was sent out wrong because I was never told there was more than one possibility for the correct part (and it is $30 each time). I would have gladly done anything they asked to make sure they were sending the correct one if they had only told me that was a potential issue. Instead, I could visualize the guy at KEP shrugging his shoulders with a perfect IDGAF look on his face on the other end of the phone when he told me there were 2 possible correct parts, and he sent the wrong one; basically "I picked the wrong one, oh well, there goes $60 of your money". Honestly, $60 doesn't mean much to me. It just really chaps my ass that their attitude was "huh, we sent you the wrong part. It will cost you $60 to fix that, and we're gonna hold your $250 until we get the wrong part back." Not even a hint of "oops, my bad".

I fix other people's problems for a living. The irony is that doing that all day everyday sometimes makes me question my response to things like this when they happen to me. I respect and appreciate the perspective of this very diverse crew. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/beerchug.gif)

Toast, I thought there was a 95% chance the guy was just covering his ass when he said this part "could" be the right one in some set ups. Good to know that wasn't just a hand job. BTW, you guys really don't get a volume discount???

Steve, thanks for the heads up on the pedal stop/broken diaphragm relationship. It's very likely that's exactly what happened. For a while now I've had a "variable clutch pedal" problem. Sometimes I had enough pedal travel, sometimes I did not, and I couldn't spot any rhyme or reason to it. So, I had the stop pushed all the way back to allow more travel when it acted up. Eventually I found that I had a sheared roll pin in the clutch pedal, but there was enough left of one end of the pin that it created interference to make the pedal bind on the shaft. It always pulled the cable, but the amount was random. So, my attempt to accommodate the problem while I figured it out probably broke the pressure plate. Good to know.


As always, thanks to everyone for the input. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/monkeydance.gif)