I originally took my car in to have its service doing, oil etc. I then got a phone call a couple of hours later telling me that I required a lot of repair to the front axle as the bearings were on their way out, the cv boot was ripped and a list as long as my arm of other little bits on the axle were going bad and making the car potentially unsafe.
I had a feeling the CV boot was ripped due to oil spots appearing under my car whenever I was parked so I took their word for it as they are the mechanic and agreed to pay out $1600 to have all of the work done.
Shortly after getting my car back I noticed a knocking whenever I'd turn a corner slowly coming from the left side, and that the abs was failing intermittently gradually getting worse, as time went on I started to notice a whirring noise coming from the right front side, not too dissimilar with worn bearings.
I eventually got time to jack the car up and see if there was anything physically wrong that I could immediately see and found that the left cv boot had not been tightened up at all and had leaked oil everywhere, so I took it back to them straight away after noticing this and explained the problems I had been having since I had the car returned to me and they took it and apparently checked everything out before re-doing the CV boot.
They then informed me that the intermittent ABS fault was being caused by the right speed sensor going bad. Knowing that this is a common fault on a car my age I believed them, but told them to hold off on the repairs, as it was the end of the month and I needed to wait until payday to be able to finance the repairs. And that with the fault it had it would only be the ABS that would not work, which being aware of would not make the car dangerous to drive.
On the way home I noticed some extremely strange and dangerous behavior from the car, at less than 40mph the car would be working fine with no ABS failure lights on, over 40 the ABS light would come on permanently as if it had been activated and when I broke the back end wheels would lock up, switching between the left and the right wheel causing my car to fish tail. I immediately pulled off to the side of the road and disconnected the ABS control module completely disabling the ABS and the car was back to braking normally just without the aid of ABS if the situation got sticky.
When I got home, now not trusting the guys that had worked on it, I looked on the internet and found on an Audi forum that the ABS speed sensors were a common fault with a car this age, and that a lot of the time it could just be due to dirt, and a good clean can sometimes get them working again.
Knowing that they are easy to get to with the wheels removed I cleaned the left side one first; it was so thick with grime and dirt that I believed that this could have been a cause. I then started to do the right side, the side they had informed my was 'degrading', only for it to appear like someone had taken some kind of tool like a hammer or other heavy object and hit it on the corner completely destroying it. The staff at Ted Wiens was adamant that no one had touched anything to do with the ABS.
They had also blamed the whirring sound that I had mentioned earlier, which I still believe to be the wheel bearings that they had apparently changed, on the speed sensor. I'm no car mechanic but I am an aircraft mechanic and I can see just by looking at the way the whole thing sits that this cannot be the case.
In short do not go to Ted Wiens as they will take your money do a half ass'd, poor job and then rip you off.
I just wish that I had had the tools with me so that I could have done it myself. Then there would have been only me to blame.
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