Is ARD worth it or not? i have had many people tell me to stay away from these guys...should i give them a chance?

 

You hear bad things about and from EVERY shop. I hear more bad things about ARD than any other shop though.

 

Yes you should. Everyone had as opinion about shops....bad and good. A big group from the Houston Performance Driving forum got together last night for dinner. A few guys just had their Z06 and Cobra worked on by them. They had nothing but great things to say about Owen/Jay and crew.

Long story short....Yes, take your ride into them. Good luck.

 

i havent had any experience with ard but my car was tuned by owen while he was working with hpe and its a very good tune. drives like stock

 

Same here, Owen tuned my car and he's a great guy. IMO give him a shot as he's been on the LT1 and LS series seen for quite a while.

 

I guess it's just hit or miss with them. They worked on my car for quite some time and started out doing pretty damn good work. Then they started cutting corners and half assing everything that they did on it.

Here's how it sits right now.

They put a JUNK converter in it.

The transmission is officially gone (ARD "stage 3"). I can't totally blame that on Owen, because he did tell me not to spray it in overdrive, and I did last weekend and that's when it went completely out, but I was having problems out of it before then with it slipping and not wanting to shift out of second on spray. This had been happening ever since he built it and it never has worked right.

There was a point in time while they were still working on the car that it was having some MAJOR problems not wanting to downshift, which it still doesn't do correctly. Owen ran around like a cat chasing his tail trying to figure out what was causing it, and replaced the converter, messed with the TPS, messed with the tune, and finally decided to replace the computer because he decided that a driver for the transmission had gone bad. that got the problem mostly corrected, but the problem with that was he didn't tell me that it was an aftermarket computer, and the damn things kept going bad. the car would break down out of nowhere and i would have to get it towed back to his shop. Owen would send his wrecker guy out, and i never paid for a tow, except for the time that it broke down at the car wash, and i had to pay to get it towed to my house, and that wrecker driver scratched the hell out of my driver's door. i found out that i could get a factory computer at the dealer for $177 and i offered to just buy that and asked owen to give me my money back ($150) for the aftermarket crap that he was putting in there, and he refused to do that.

There's some kind of parasitic draw somewhere that is killing the **** out of my batteries. I have to go to Wal Mart about once every two months and get a warranty a battery because it keeps killing them to where they won't even hold a charge. It's somewhere in the nitrous wiring I'm sure, I think I have it narrowed down to the bottle opener, but I'm not certain yet.

That brings me to my next complaint. I had them cut a fuel pump access panel in my car. The way I understood that this was to be done, they were to just cut it completely out, replace the fuel pump, and then cover it with a panel and seal it. What they did was cut it on 3 sides, BEND IT BACK, and then bend it back down the best that they could and duct tape the **** out of it. I'm sorry, but I just don't think that that's the way that you should work on peoples' cars.

I will say that Owen, Jay, Marissa, and Kerry were always real friendly and always seemed to want to help out the best that they could, but I just think that Owen let working on his own cars get in the way of doing the right kind of work on his customers' cars. They messed up my car and quite a few (and I mean QUITE a few) of my friends' cars before I stopped recommending them.

I'm not trying to bash them, I'm just sharing my experience.

Here's my fuel pump access door. Would you pay anyone to do this to your car?

 

I've heard bad things too.

Couple friends of mine have raced a few ARD cars back when everyone met up off of 249, and every one of them seemed to be really slow for what they were, or they would break/smoke/leak like crazy.

Again, that's not MY personal experience, but the experiences of close friends. I think the post above of the fuel pump access door says enough though.

 

I forgot to mention that they stripped out all of my torque converter bolts putting them in with an impact one time. I drove out of there and by the time that i parked the car at Hooter's at 1960 and 45 it was rattling like a MF'er when i cut it off. Jay did that and was very apologetic to me about doing it, which I think Jay actually is a pretty cool guy. Owen acted like he could give a **** about it. I had to take the car over to Bad Chad's house and he fixed it up for me.

There's numerous other problems that I had, i just can't think of them all at once

 

that's a sweet fuel pump door man... seriously??? Duct Tape and cardboard????

 

confused...hear so many bad things, but really want to trust work.

 

well i had my car tuned there everything worked great.they put me a fuelpump hole in my car and it looked nothing like that it looked real nice.i must say owen goes out of his way to help someone all i have had was a tune done and i am completely happy with what they did.

 

I'll keep this short and sweet. There were numerous other problems I had as well, these are just the ones that stick out the most to me.

I got a 6.0L shortblock put into my Camaro by ARD after a lifter exploded in my stock motor. I couldn't afford a forged engine so this was my best alternative at the time.

Some of my biggest concerns when I tore the engine down after about a year of rebuilds on ARD's dime because the car smoked badly, had lots of electrical problems and I decided to just send it to LME like I should have done the first time can be seen below.

What I paid for:
New rings for the 6.0L
Mellings Ported High Volume Oil Pump
Double Roller Timing Chain

What I received upon the teardown of the 6.0L:
My stock 5.7 LS1 10X,XXX mile rings
**Stock Oil Pump that was absolutely trashed with garbage all in it. They tried to port/shim it. The bolts that hold the plate on the oil pump were stripped.
Stock Timing Chain

**Perhaps this is why the engine lost all oil pressure on the 20 minute drive home after I picked it up...

Like rooster, I am not trying to bash ARD, just simply sharing my experience with them.

 

Holy S**t!

 

Just remember, you are going to get 1 side of the story on this. Anything can happen with used parts and cheap customers, etc. I've seen some top notch stuff come out of ARD. I've also seen not so impressive stuff like mentioned above. They will quote some low prices, and I think that attracts some cheapass customers at times. Some of their repeat customers with multiple cars who do not cut costs have some impressive rides.

 

cheap *** customers, huh? LOL. I think I hear Owen in your ear already. Even if that were the case, which it certainly wasn't with me, is it a good business practice for a shop to just half *** work and put the wrong parts in just because a customer is on a budget? Is it fair that the guy a couple of posts up paid for a Melling oil pump and got a piece of ****? What did he do to deserve that? I kinda want to take a look at mine now, because not only did I PAY for a Melling pump, but I ordered it through WS6Store and personally delivered all of the parts including that pump to Owen to install it. My oil pressure has never been what it was said to be with a Melling pump installed and it's been in the back of my head ever since.

I gave that man FREE advertising on my website for over a year, and brought THOUSANDS OF DOLLARS worth of work into his shop, and he repaid me by ******* up my car and everybody else's that he touched that I told to go to him.

My buddy Luke had ARD build his transmission, and after about 2 months, reverse started slipping. he has to almost floor it in reverse to get it to start crawling. He took it back to ARD, they looked at it, and what was their response? It must be the tune. It can't be the transmission. :rofl:

Eddie went through numerous ARD transmissions in his car

Chad's brother Darril Wayne had them do a cam install, tune, and build the transmission. It was one of those cams with a 113+2 lsa or whatever it was that had to be degreed. they didn't degree it and never could get it to idle right. the transmission went out and they won't warranty it or even return their calls.

They messed up the tune on Tim's Vette. He was trying to bring it in to get it retuned (free retune mind you). They said they couldn't get him in all week. He had a friend call the next day and schedule a first time tune and they said they could get to it that afternoon. Tim showed up with his car and they were pissed. That's not to mention them dropping Tim's Vette off of a jack and tearing up his fender. Nor does it mention the numerous scratches that I have all over my car now from when it was sitting up there or them spilling something corrosive all over my core support.

I can go on and on and on and on and on. I have plenty of stories about how they have messed myself and my friends around.

 

Yeah I would be MF pissed and you still have it like that...they would have fixed it the right way or payed my bill for having a shop fix it.

 

yeah i need to get it fixed. i've just been trying to take care of the more pressing problems with the car first

 

It doesn't really matter to me. I just posted what I had seen first hand. ARD is not a sponsor on here and won't get a fair shake at defending themselves. That is why I posted.

 

My fuel pump door looks like that, but I did a better job of taping it down. I used Gorilla tape, it's black and the car is black. Holds and looks better than duct tape.

 

you did your fuel pump door job yourself, correct?