Business ProfileforFern Creek Auto & Truck Repair

I gave my 1984 Ford F150 to Fern Creek Auto & Truck (FCA) around the first of June 2019. Instructions were to get it running after having already rebuilt the engine and wasting a lot of money on two other “mechanics”. I initially said there was no rush, but by the next summer (2020) nothing had been done and I began pressing for progress on the truck. TWO YEARS LATER (late May 2022), I finally got the truck back, and that was only after my son (now an adult) and I worked on FCA’s lot to get it running ourselves. I was charged $1855 for this “service”. The issue here was a combination of ignorance and indifference. Something was obviously still wrong when FCA basically gave up and turned it over to us. It barely ran and we determined that no oil was getting to some of the valves. Although lifters were new, at FCA’s suggestion, we bought another new set and installed ourselves at FCA’s lot. FCA insisted that our new head had adjustable rocker arms although this this was verifiably incorrect with just a little online research. But we managed to get it running well enough to take home, with FCA’s instruction that the new lifters just needed more running time to pump up. After driving the truck for a while, it got worse. Without going into too many details, the problem all along was that an oil channel plug was left out of the engine block during the initial rebuild (prior to FCA involvement), causing oil to bypass the upper block and head. My son, who now owned the truck, determined this with a simple oil pressure check on each cylinder, something that FCA definitely should have done. Since FCA did not have the knowledge and/or initiative to properly troubleshoot, and returned the truck to us with poor oil circulation and incorrect valve lash, the engine was basically ruined. My son finally got it running properly after spending thousands more dollars to completely rebuild the engine again.