Complaint Review: Proformance Unlimited - Melbourne Florida

It’s unfortunate that this customer feels this way. This all could have been avoided. It’s pretty sad when a customer admits that he was the cause of the failure then posts negative feedback about our company. At no time prior to the engine being returned to us for inspection did the customer admit to altering the engine until we found what was wrong.  

This customer purchased our Ford 347 425hp engine combo in May of 2016. He requested the build to come with no carburetor since he planned to install a Fi-Tech EFI system. I suggested to him to send us the EFI unit so we could dyno test the engine and tune the EFI system to the engine on the dyno, which is what we did at no additional cost. When the engine was dyno tested we tuned and configured the engine so it would run optimal with his supplied EFI system. As for the water pump being wrong, if a customer doesn’t purchase a serpentine pulley kit from us, we default to what water pump came with the engine based on year make and model. I do agree the compressor noise coming on in the background of his video was annoying. If we would have caught it before the engine came off the dyno we would have had the guys do a new video with no background noise.

Our customer called us in May of 2018 and said the first time he fired the engine up for the 2018 season the engine was running rough and he said it ran great before he put it away for the winter. We gave him some areas to check out on the engine. We didn’t hear back from him until he called in the beginning June, telling us that the engine had some type of failure and he thought the connecting rod bearing spun and the connecting rod broke. We asked him to send the engine back in to us so we could identify what had happened. We said to him that if there was a fault with the engine that we caused we would take care of it. We don’t have many issues like this and would take care of it.

Our customer asked what the cause of the failure could be from, and it’s very hard to tell what the cause could be until you see the engine. We said to him that it is possible that he had gotten some bad fuel or the fuel he was using didn’t have the proper octane or too much ethanol in the fuel. We have found over the years that in certain parts of the US, there is fuel that has a higher content of ethanol, which will cause things like carburetors or EFI systems to malfunction. Since the prior feedback was the engine ran really good before it was put away for the winter, we said that the fuel was most likely the cause. If the carburetor and EFI system is not supplying the engine with proper fuel due to it having clogged ports, this will cause the engine to run poorly and cause detonation.

At no time did the customer say I modified the engine. About 2 weeks after we received the engine back, we had time to start looking into what caused the engines failure. When an engine comes back for repair we go through them with great detail. We don’t have many failures at all, so we like to locate the source so the same mistake or part failure, if any, doesn’t occur again. We quickly noticed that someone had altered the distributor. They tried to have the timing controlled by the EFI system, which is fine when you do it correctly. Someone had attempted to lock the distributor out using MSD’s adjustable race rotor, but failed to follow the complete instructions, which caused the engine failure. You can’t have both mechanical advance and computer advance at the same time; you never know where the timing will be. It could have had 80 or more degrees timing at full advance. Proper ignition timing is very critical. Since the timing was not correct the cylinders went into detonation and caused 2 pistons to melt down. What was thought to be a spun bearing was not. When the pistons melted down they let the connecting rods break through the block. We removed the top end of the engine to further our inspection. After removing the cylinder heads it was clear what the problem was.

Once we found this problem we called our customer to let him know what we found. He admitted to doing the modification over the winter. He asked if we were still going to cover the repair. We explained to him that this was not in anyway our fault and this could have been prevented if he called to go over the modification that he was doing. He stated that he didn’t have the funds to repair the engine and to return it to him without repair. At this point we said there was no reason to disassemble the bottom end of the engine. If this failure was in anyway our fault, we would have covered it. We always stand behind our builds but this mistake was the customer’s fault and resulted in the need of a complete new long block. It’s a shame the customer would post something like this even now knowing it was his fault.

We were willing to help him out by selling him the parts at our cost with minimal labor costs. We asked the customer to pay for the shipping fees, he claimed he didn’t have the funds so we agreed to cover the shipping one way. I fully understand that he couldn’t afford it but why say we ripped him off and we sold him a bad engine. It was his modification to the engine that made it fail not the products we used or workmanship. We do everything we can to make sure that a customer gets a very good product. We spend hours on the phone with our customers going over there builds and giving technical assistance, so customers don’t have any issues.