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So fourth of July weekend I get back to my storage and pull in, and here a horrible binding sound in my trailer. I get out, one of the wheels is covered in a reddish/purple dust (not your standard brake dust). So upon further inspection, I find the oil bearing hub is gone, and the hub is misaligned. Also the wheel is leaning severly on turns. I get the trailer into my spot, and head home as it had been a long weekend.
When I go back the following day, I yank the wheel to look at all the damage. The rotor had a chunk missing, the caliper was cracked in half, and the spindle assembly was shot!
I get ahold of prestige and get pics to Byron, the VP at prestige. First thing he does is try and diagnose why it happened. This is where we had differing opinions. He said the only way the oil bath assembly came off was by me hitting something, even though in my e-mail I said I hadn't hit anything. My assesment was that something got loose and misaligned. The misalignment caused the oil bearing hub to come off causing a bearing failure, the misalignment also caused sever damage to the braking system. There was zero damage to the other wheel nor the fender, so I was shooting down the hitting something idea, and demanding warranty work.
He came back and politely described that I misunderstood him about hitting something. He meant that something (I.E. a piece of road debris) flew up and hit the hub. He explained that it took an incredible amount of force to dislodge the hub assembly, due to the way it's put together and held in place. I believed that was a more plausible argument as I hadn't hit anything, but I didn't agree. I couldn't discount it... just didn't think it was what happened.
I explained that I was in the process of building a house for a competitor and they had recently experienced a few failures of the same type from the same companies hubs. However I was willing to purchase the product at cost if he would work w/ me to that extent; as the whole time he politely kept asking me how he assist me to get this fixed ASAP, even though we were at odds on what actually happened.
I called after sending that e-mail as it was just to much info to keep sending e-mails back and forth. I brought up the buying product at cost, and he promptly shut me down and told me he would not do that. I was almost speechless for a sec.... then he explained why. He had talked the manuf. and explained the situation. He told him my confidence in their product was shaken (as it was, I was gonna pull off the oil hubs and replace them w/ bearing buddies w/ grease serts). The manuf. was willing to replace my whole brake/hub/spindle assembly for free, as long as Prestige would cover shipping. I however was going to be responsible for labor.
Now I was very happy to accept this. Seeing as we were both locked in a disagreement about how it happened, Byron could have shut me down and told me I was on my own. Being a business owner myself, I understand problems occur. It's how you handle these problems that speak to your company. I realize some of you would think they should cover the labor as well. But the fact that they are covering it, despite thinking they are not at fault, speaks volume to their willingness to make customers happy. This is also the same reason I will never buy another Ford again, after how their engineers chose to handle (or not handle) a problem I had with my truck. A problem that they knew about!
I actually requested a Prestige trailer on the new boat I'm ordering, right b4 they first wanted to shut me down. I was going to stop this order if they had turned me down on this. But I'm pretty happy w/ the compromise, and will be keeping the same brand!
I only write this, as I believe Byron and prestige need some recognition. Especially since all we see on Forums anymore is bashing.
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