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Return to my Home page I was ripped off by "Brantigan's" - Don't let it happen to you!
Here is the truth - no matter what you may have "heard."
I have no reason to lie. I am providing this information in the hopes that it may save someone else from having their car ruined and their wallets cleaned out. Its an old fashioned case of bait and switch. This guy I thought I could trust, told me that a car I was looking to buy so I could race weekly told me that it needed some rear frame work to "box it in" and he would do it for $400. With this knowledge, I bought the car. I worked on rebuilding the engine, etc and brought it to him to do the $400 frame work. When I got to his home he convinced me to spend $2000-$2500 to also test/fix the leaf springs, replace my front and rear shocks, do "more frame work", and bolt on the traction bars that I provided. If the bars did not fit, he would weld them in. We also agreed to install two racing seats I provided. That was our verbal agreement. Already MUCH more than I was planning on spending on this car to install seats and fix what I thought was a $400 frame fix when I drove it in.
Things started adding up as the weeks rolled by and he finally called to say that this and that broke, and he had done this and that as well.. demanding that he now needed to buy new wheels and tires - again I suggested that I could buy them and provide them, but again he insisted that he "had a friend" that could get them - again thinking that he could get them cheaper perhaps than I would so I reluctantly agreed... I was figuring that since these were all things I never asked him to do, that he was not going to charge me for them(except for parts). As he got closer to finally completing this job he never mentioned how much he was going to charge me, so I was again - figuring that there was no change on our original agreement. So, on a whim, I thought that it would be easier to install a roll cage as long as the seats were out of the car and would take less time and therefore cost less money so I suggested he install a simple cage that meets the basic minimum standards of nhra - giving him the specs and also suggested that I provide the cage - readily available from summit racing and jegs and he only had to install it. He declined and said he would "make it." At this point, I was mistaken into thinking that he was thinking of MY best interests and not his own and that he could make it cheaper than I could buy it already made (~250 I think it was).
Some other shit he did to my street car was he built a 1 foot diameter oval drive shaft loop in a crossmember he added which drags ever so nicely on bumpy pavement and forget about speed bumps... He also chopped off my exhaust pipes which were very nice going out the back to dual turbos for nice torque, and chopped off the pipe at the headers - added the mufflers in FRONT of the crossmember and stuck two ridiculous pipes out the side of the car like it was some kind of circle track car. This is SO not legal on the street. Its all this "extra crap" he did to my car that he probably charged me $100 / hour for
. He's too cheap to buy a real garage or lift, so he works out of his own garage and he lifted my car up with a chain mounted to my trunk. Well - that bent up my trunk so bad that he had to cut out the mount and it has a real good bulge to it - not closing tight anymore and barely hooks onto the cutout sheet metal he left. This trunk fit PERFECT before he touched it. Also in my car was the new fiberglass airbox that I had just ordered along with my hood which mysteriously disappeared during its stay at his garage along with other miscellaneous items he probably figured I would never notice. After the shock I went through seeing my car like this - finding out how much $$$$ he was robbing me of to do this "work" and thinking "How could I be so stupid as to think he was a "friend" and looking out for my best interests.. I didn't notice too much that night I went to pick it up. When I went to pick up the car and saw all the extra garbage he did to it without my permission, I knew he wasn't kidding about the price he was demanding for it... charging me over $7,000 for work done to a $1,200 car.
All this, and the guy would not give me ANY receipt,
would not even tell me how much ANYTHING cost him - giving me the old line -
"That's not how I do business"
I'm sorry - I didn't realize you were in the business of ripping off your friends!
If this guy wasn't in my car club, I would have just walked out on him that night.
I felt so stupid - so used. And now I'm left with a car that I don't even like,
and I have to fix to be able to do anything with it!
Nobody will believe me what I paid for all this work on it when I don't have a receipt,
so I will probably never be able to sell it.
So - incase any of you are thinking of being taken in by him or any other low life
who pretends to be your friend just to get your money, be forewarned.
This loser's name is Art Brantigan.
He calls his "service" "Brantigan's"
(Probably so he can get out of paying taxes)
By the way - I'm not the ONLY person who has gotten screwed by him.
And if you are ever crazy enough to go to his house -
see if you notice my missing airbox still around!
Here is a pic of my new hood air box that disappeared while in Brantigan's garage.
