Hey all, I'm looking for some advice on an unfortunate situation with an automotive repair center
I have a 2009 Honda Civic GX, a rare vehicle that runs on CNG out of the factory, one of the few. It was a family heirloom passed down from my Grandpa and used to save me tons on fuel costs. The car is identical to a normal civic but with a higher compression and a different fuel system
One day I was driving it and everything was fine, I shut the car off and went back to start it again and it would crank easy but no firing at all. This had happened to me before and it was the crankshaft position sensor so I figured it was likely the same culprit again. I did some research for a reputable automotive repair center and found one and had it towed there.
They took a look at my car and called me up. He said the spark plugs in it look pretty bad, as in difficult to remove, and they wanted $275 to change them but that's only if the spark plugs come out easy he said, if they don't then it will be more. I said to him that the car was running fine and then just quit firing at all rather suddenly, and that this had happened before and the culprit was the crankshaft position sensor. I was really skeptical of him changing the spark plugs for this reason because that just didn't seem to be the culprit to me. He said, well the book says that the first thing you start with is making sure you have good spark, so that's what I'm doing. I said yea, but could it really be the spark plugs? Would they all really go bad at once like that all at the same time? He said maybe, if the cold weather over night caused the gap to change or something like that. This seemed really odd to me, but I needed to get my car repaired and on the road, so I said alright, I guess if that's what you have to do then go ahead.
A little bit later I talked to someone and I realized how silly this sounded about the spark plug gap changing from the weather and the whole thing just didn't seem logical at all. I thought shoot, I should call them up and have them cancel this, so I picked up the phone and asked them to stop working on it, but by then the damage was done, he had stripped three of the spark plugs into the cylinder head.
I tried to ask them, why didn't you just spray some penetrant oil or something like that so that they wouldn't get stripped? He gave me a reply that didn't even make sense, he said "Because you called me up and said to stop working on it". At the time I was just really not in the but I should have pushed back on these people harder. I did not feel comfortable having my car worked on by these people so I just had it towed out of there and it's been sitting at my house ever since, not running.
Now I am out a car and I just feel screwed over by these people. I just wanted to get your guys thoughts on what they did, and see if you might have any advice on what I can do about this situation? I feel like it was incredibly dumb of them to go ahead with the plugs, without even spraying some type of penetrant oil in there first to prevent this from happening, and when the culprit didn't even seem to be the spark plugs in the first place. That being said, they claim that it is the original spark plugs with 150,000 miles on the car. I don't know about that because I only recently got the car from my Grandpa, but the whole situation just seems really messed up to me. At no point did he take the time to explain to me that if the spark plugs don't come out right, it was going to require a whole new cylinder head and thousands of dollars more in repairs, I mean that alone might have been a good thing to mention to me on the phone. Also at no point did he change up his methods when the first plug didn't come out right so as to prevent stripping out the others, he just kept right on doing the same thing with each and every spark plug, blindly following the book when the likely culprit wasn't even spark plugs in the first place.
