Here are the facts: Around Jan 5 I saw Chuck Schuster tilt columns favorably mentioned in this forum, I called him and he said he had a 67 GTO tilt column that he could ship in a week or two. I sent the check for $595 on Jan 11 and it cleared on Jan 18. Around Feb 13 I called for a status report and CS said it would ship in by the end of the week. Around Feb 20 he told me it would ship the next day or so. Around March 6 he said it would ship the next day. Around March 10-13 he did not return phone calls. At this point I figure I am about to get screwed out of $600 and left a message that he could either return the money or send the column -- I didn't care. On March 14 I figured out (through this forum) that another restorer was connected with CS so I sent an email to that individual and received a reply email stating that CS was overcome with work (presumably that had come in AFTER my Jan order) and that he would get mine out in a few days. The column arrived yesterday, March 23, nine weeks after the check was cashed, and 11 weeks after I first talked with him and placed the order. It looks great.
I have no problem with waiting three months. I have waited longer than that for some parts when I was redoing my car's interior, including the dash guages. In those cases, however, I was given accurate information on how long it would take, and I made an initial downpayment with the balance due when the parts were ready to ship. When you send $600 to someone half way across the country that you never heard of before (sometimes necessary when dealing with car restorations) it makes me very nervous when I get repeated inaccurate and misleading information for a month. I really thought I was going to be screwed out of the $600 or wind up in some PITA collection process with the WI Consumer Protection Agency. If CS ran into problems, he should have said so. I now have the column, it looks great, and I presume it will work as well as it looks.
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