[wristwister]

Reminds me of when I needed my A4 crankshaft ground. I went to the shop "everyone goes to" first, sparkly place with great customer service and spotless shop coats. I found out they didn't actually have the equipment there to grind crankshafts, they sent them to another shop to have the work done.

I was able to get the name of that other shop so I went there. Older, out of the way place, no front desk, parts laying around all over the place, and finally I found an old guy in a greasy shop coat and talked to him. He said "yeah, we used to grind crankshafts, but we couldn't afford to keep the expensive machinery going, so we send 'em out for grinding". I found out where he sent the crankshafts.

Holy crap, you should see this place! It's next to the homeless shelter in the worse part of town, no signage, old run down buildings, stacks of parts all over the place, and nonexistent to downright rude customer service. But sure enough, they had the one and only crank grinding machine in the area. Turns out crankshafts from pretty much every shop in the Puget Sound area go through them as they're the only ones with the machinery and skill to do it.

they did a great job on my crank and I had them do the works to the block as well, all at reasonable prices. I'm guessing if I had just gone through the first sparkly clean shop with smiling customer service I would have paid much more, considering there would have been a few markups along the way before the crank found it's way to the grinder.