The Dealership Murdered My Motorcycle

This man murders motorcycles for a living.

You would think that when a customer drops a motorcycle off for repair that a dealership's standard operating procedure would include returning the bike in functional condition. That's their job, isn't it? You wouldn't expect them to give you a bike with absolutely no oil in the engine or gearbox and transform a perfectly good bike into a mechanical time bomb just waiting for the perfect time for a catastrophic breakdown?

My dead engine. It's looking forward to a life in the junkyard.

Well that is exactly what the craptastic mechanics at Southern Motors (7,1st Main Road, Gopalapuram, Chennai, +91 - 44 -55500220) gave back to me after installing a what they said was a brand new engine. After taking almost two weeks and several thousand rupees to diagnose the problem with my old engine (it was beyond repair), they bought me a well maintained used engine in a local scrap market and installed it on my bike. They even went through the effort to stencil a new serial number on the engine so that it would match up with my registration papers. When I got it back it drove like a dream for almost 100 kilometer before the whole contraption began to melt down.The stencils they used to imprint a new serial number on my new (used) engine

By some stoke of luck the bike did make it through the trip from Chennai to Ooti abd back again, but in the home stretch the innards began making a horrible metal on metal noise that sounded far too much like the final gasp of C3P0 would make before being rendered into parts.

Yesterday I posted that I would make it to a mechanic in town to get it fixed, but alas, I spent an hour this morning trying to get it running again. It never turned over. Instead I pushed it to a nearby mechanic who shook his head and said that I waste too much money on this bike. It is probably time for a new one. He said he'd have it back to me this afternoon in a semblance of running condition.

The moral of the story is to never trust the people at Southern Motors with your bikes. Not only will they charge too much for their labor, but the bike will come back in worse condition than you left it.