this is branden, aarons partner.

maybee some other details that may have been left out.

this kid did alot of talking through this. i told him over and over again i needed payment, atleast partial to continue work. he assured us over and over again, his grandfather was picking up the bill in full. this was a present for finishing up school. but his grandfather was realy "old school" and wanted the work done first. i told him REPEATEDLY that i couldnt afford to do much more work because he was draining my bank account. again he didnt care about that, wanted the work done.

now i have a new shop, a big job like this would give the shop the money to take off. so i figured i better keep the customer happy, and i kept spending.


as far as charity goes, i'd rather see it go to someone providing legal aid to those in dire need of it. sure childrens charities are nice, but i'm the one being affected by this, and it woulda been nice to have a lawyer pick this up on the spot and deal with it.

ive got a 4 week old son, atreyu trenton that ive barely got to see, aaron and i have been workin 90+ hour weeks trying to get this car done and done right for this kid, ive barely been home. you can ask some of the local guys, weve worked 20 hour days only to rest for 4-5 hours and come back for another 15 hours. now my bank account is empty and i'm trying to figure out what parts i can sell to pay for my house to keep the kids in a home.

its not just that he tried to scam someone, he knew what his scam would do to my FAMILY and he did it without remorse

There is about $250 that has been donated. I've contacted a few attorney's and they want a retainer fee of at least $1,000 and even then I don't have the money to do that.

It sucks but even if we come up with the retainer fee Branden and I don't have enough money to survive the next week, let alone the 30 days minimum this is going to take to get through. I am going to have some things posted up for sale soon so if anyone needs something please let me know!

I'm probably going to come off as the bad guy here, but I simply can't believe you guys would extend yourself to that level for a customer. If you guys had a larger company and could deal with a larger overhead it would be a bit more understandable, but to do all this work without payments and put yourself in a situation where you can't pay your bills? No offense, but with that level of financial irresponsibility how well is your business going to be run?

And YES, I have read the thread and say that this guy offered a bunch of lame excuses for not putting money down. But excuses don't keep a roof over one's head and at some point you simply need to say, "We need money to be able to continue with this project". Presumably before you're 16K into it.

In all this situation sucks. This Joe kid seems like a complete scumbag. And truthfully I hope you guys can recoup your losses and that he is punished accordingly. But I know I'd never put my family's well being and the roof over my head in jeopardy over verbal IOUs and promises. Best of luck. Ill be watching and hope this plays out well.

What people don't seem to be understanding is that we did not extend his credit line in terms of what we had into the car cash wise by very much.

On a basic paint job color change there is around $1000 in materials for the type of paint I use and the method I like to prep a car. This car has more money in paint because of the engine bay and interior panels that were smoothed and painted so I would say probably more like this:

$1600 in paint materials, then we have $700 in NEW Toyota seals, $700 in aftermarket gauges for the car, $800 in carbon fiber and fiberglass supplies, $50 in clamps, $20 in gaskets. We have lots of other little odds and ends we had to buy during the job but I'm not going to nit-pick those on here.

His ebay wastegate was missing the sleeve that seals it so we used a Tial I had at the shop, no initial cost out of my pocket since I already had it and was planning on selling it. Then we found a hole in his intercooler so we used one from a MK3 Supra Project that Branden was building for himself, again we already had. But between those two items we had $300 on the bill.

What it boils down to is that we spent a lot of time working on his car which is where most of the bill comes from, LABOR, not that we had $16K out of pocket.

Although it did keep us from working on other cars consistently, I did several overall paint jobs that were color changes, did some other small paint work jobs, built two engines, did three engine swaps, a tranny job, and two head gasket jobs.

The problem is that all the profit from those jobs went into keeping Joe's car going so that I could get that big pay-off from all the labor. Now I feel like I did all those jobs for free in addition to Joe's car.

What some people don't understand and what hasn't been explained a lot was, he initially only asked for a paint job. While they were working on it, he would come in and ask for more jobs to be done on it. He didn't just walk in with a big *** list and say, "Do it". That's where the verbal agreements come into play, also with the assurance that Joe had the funds to cover it. he mentioned his grandfather and sponsors (lol).

I fully understand that. I read plenty of this monster thread. Still, at the point the kid owes 3-4k in labor and paying bills is getting a little tricky, most normal businesses would say, "You need to pay for some of the labor first and then we can expand the project." We don't even start work @ my company without a 50% deposit on the original estimate. And if halfway through the scope of the project should dramatically change we'll certainly require more capital to help assure we won't pour resources into a project for a client that simply isn't going to pay. I'm sorry, I've read all of it. It still doesn't make sense to basically be floating a kid a 16K credit line. It wasn't 16K at first, but they kept extending more credit to him until it was.

Wow, this grew rather quickly. I suppose when you take thousands of people that have no life, and put them on the internet this is what happens. I will have the car by Friday afternoon. I can guarantee that 100%. Mark my word.By the way, I like all the attention this is bringing on me. Keep it up.

ive got a fender roller and a heat gun... you wanna suport us. come get your fenders rolled, 40 a corner... group rates too. i also do exhaust work, i can do at the house, ive got 3 and 4 " mandrel bends in stock. full mandrel exhausts starting at 350

ok i feel the need to break in here. my name is heather. im BRANDENS (with a e not a o) fiance. thats mine and brandens money that funded that stupid piece of rice. i personally have not met the kid, talked to him on the phone once and he was too scared to tell me his name. also being a mother myself (we have two little boys that are suffering from the fact that this stupid theif stole our money) i would like to meet his mother and shake her hand for the awesome job she did of raising this turd.

anyway i would ask that the threats on his person stay to a min. i do not want this thread ending up in court and Branden and Aarons character be attacked for allowing it. We will get this guy. and hopefully the next girlfriend he has will be his cellmate buba.
ok im done on with the joe bashing.
p.s. and thanks everyone for the support

Originally Posted by XDoctor View Post
Hey guys, I joined just to write this single post in this thread. Its been linked to over at AR15.com.

Has anyone considered that this may be just another scam by that same kid? It has all the marks of a great con. Someone is in trouble, ruined by no fault of their own. They're trying to make it right but its taking some time and seems difficult. Suddenly he can't afford to put an attourney on retainer and starts taking donations. There's a great sob story, complete with a neglected newborn baby, house going to be repossessed and business going under. Can't sell the car because the lien isn't through yet, and he has apparently not done any other business in the last four and a half months to help keep the doors open. Employees, business partners and even family members of the bad guy show up, oddly enough, making some of the same grammatical errors in their corroboration to the story.

Then suddenly, a paypal account appears and people start dumping cash into it. Sounds like a good plan to me.

Then again, I may be all wet.