I found a good looking truck on ebay. I called Dan of SWAT to ask about the truck, on the phone he told me the truck ran great, only a little rust under the wheel well and a couple scratches here and there. He told me he had actually just got done pulling a boat around with it the week before. We agreed to meet at a half way point so myself and my grandfather could have a better look at it and most likely buy it.
When he came to the McDonald's that we were supposed to be meeting at, 15 minutes late because (myself and my grandpa watched this happen) he was tearing around the area squealing the tires and slamming down on the gas, of course he didn't know we were already waiting for him watching what he was doing since I hadn't called him and told him we were at McDonald's waiting.
Immediately I noticed a black strip running the entire length of the truck on both sides on the bottom. It was obviously a custom paint job but looked good, I had a suspicion there was some rust under the black paint. This winter I have been proven right as almost the whole length of the truck is showing rust where they painted over it.
Next I noticed that the tailgate's handle was missing, no big deal as the whole reason I was looking for a new truck is that my last one was stolen and wrecked so we had plenty of extra parts. That job was taken care of by my step-dad and uncle and required a lot of lubricants to get the latch to actually open again.
I noticed it sounded a little louder than usual but the exhaust looked factory. Dan told me he had a custom exhaust put on the truck, me being the fool he made me into didn't bother to get under and look at the exhaust. Turned out that it wasn't a custom exhaust job, the tail pipe had simply disconnected from the muffler (the factory standard muffler). Again no big deal, I had custom dual straight pipes to take off my junk truck that fit nicely onto my new truck.
I then jumped in the driver's seat to take it for a test drive. First thing I noticed was the passenger side window wouldn't roll down using the driver side controller. No big deal, probably was just corroded, easy fix. Well it turned out to be just that so that wasn't a big deal either.
As I started driving I immediately noticed a clicking sound towards the front of the truck, first thing that popped into my head was wheel bearings are bad, when we got back my grandpa agreed. I was concentrating so much on the wheel bearings by that time I forgot to take a quick look at the rest of the truck.
To get me to buy the truck Dan agreed that he would pay for the clicking noise, whatever it was, to be fixed. He wrote it down on the sales papers, he signed it, dated it, I signed it and dated it as well.
When I got it home finally we started digging in. We ended up finding out the air conditioner didn't work (my grandpa asked him to his face if the air conditioner worked and he said it did) and we still haven't figured out for sure what is wrong with it. We also found the the brake pads were in horrible need of replacement, a new seal was needed for the front transfer case, new u-joints were needed, the rear drive shaft was as close to simply flying off as you could imagine.
After driving it for a couple days I noticed that when I pressed on the brakes hard enough coming up to a stop sign my truck stalled half of the time and the boat he just pulled the week before he sold it to me? Well he must have been pulling it illegally because when I went to hook up a trailer to my truck a week after buying it I immediately noticed there was massive corrosion. Plugged in the plug and as you could imagine the lights didn't work. Once we tore apart the cable and found two wires were disconnected from the plug and it all was badly corroded.
I purchased the truck in July of '08 and tomorrow will be Jan. 1st of '09. I've tried many times to reach him on his phone. The couple times I have reached him on his phone he simply asked me to email him a copy of the bill and he would call me back the next day. I did so, three times, nothing was ever received, no return calls.
Now my grandfather is taking this to his lawyer and trying to finally get the money owed to me. Really looking back, had I taken all the repair work to a repair shop or a Dodge dealership the cost would have been with out a problem $$3000, it only cost me a little over $800. I was only asking Dan to pay for half of that even and simply send me $400.
So in summation never, never, never ever purchase anything from this man or this company. They lie on the phone, they lie to your face, and hopefully if they keep getting sued they might learn their lesson.
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