New Engine Builder, who would you use? Options

[RFoulds]

Who is out there that can reliably build and warranty a completely new 2270?

Preferable near me in SoCal..

[thomasotten]

A few years ago, a friend of mine who is an old timer VW type 4 builder took on a 914 engine to build for someone. A few weeks into it, I get a call from the car owner wanting me to finish his motor. I said, so what happened? "He (my builder friend) told me to come pick up my sh*t" (meaning the car and a disassembled engine) and get it out of here". "He said you might be able to help me". Not liking the idea of building an engine I did not disassemble, I was more than a little hesitant. I did a little investigation, called my friend, and found out more details of why this deal went bad. "Non stop calls, texts and emails". The builder was bombarded with questions, and things the Millennial type of guy read on the forums, and "hey can we do this?", and it just led this old timer over the wall. At the time, I thought, man this was not cool. You are leaving this 914er with a basket full up parts and it is very likely to leave one more 914 perpetually in the non operational camp. I offered to step in, but I don't think the guy liked my fee, which was padded a bit because, as I said, I hate building what someone took apart - you always will be missing something. So that's how it ended for me. It's now been several years, but that episode stuck with me. Having done more work on other people's cars over the years, I can empathize more (although I still think it was a bad thing to do). But there is something to be said about boundaries. We now live in this age where, just because people can easily contact you with text messages, etc, they don't shy at all away from doing so. And if you don't respond immediately it's like you get another damn text. I'm still an email kind of guy. Because it give the recipients a chance to think before responding. For every thought, you get a text, where email could at least consolidate items. Email can be abused too, of course, but it seems to me that the era of constant communication has a lot to do with the behavior of entitlement, of lack of consideration for the other person. Someone said something about about listening just enough to respond. Yeah, I think that's part of it too.