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I echo these thoughts in Western Wa. It's sad but true, what happened to reliable work from folks you could trust that would stand behind their work if something did go wrong.
And the worst part of it all (and not limited to transmission shops) is that I have NEVER seen a shop that is worth paying them a shop rate of 100 bucks or more per hour.
You oughta see shop rates in the Puget sound area. Pretty much starting on the low end around $120 an hour. And the ones that charge a lower rate are marking up the book time, so you might find a shop charging $80, but they are "marking up" an hour of labor by charging (as an example) 1.3 hours of time for the hour. Talk about deceptive practices. One of the many reasons I've been so choosy about the shops I'll go to work for and the bad rap the industry has is one of the reason I want out. I don't mean to digress to much here I just want you to know that there are folks in the industry fed up with this stuff too.
I think Viktor is right. My old man told me that Jake was mostly doing 4l80e stuff now.
^^^ This is the most important point of them all.
I think if you read between the lines on Jake's discussions about racing transmissions, he is not too keen on messing with 4L60E's and 700R4's. Tells us a lot about which transmissions to use, and the reasons he gives for his thought processes.
I only take vehicles to the dealer for covered maintenance or warranty work. Just recently I had a vehicle at the dealer here. Their rate was over $200/hr. I did a double take to see if my eyes were deceiving me. That’s double what most professionals are making in this area. Using my formula (billing for about triple what an employee’s hourly rate is), the technician’s must be making close to $70/hr; though I highly doubt it.
$70 an hour ha. Not happening at least not around here. That use to be industry standard in automotive too. Typically the top tech or techs in a shop would be getting that rate with the lower levels under that. At least in this area back when shops were charging $60 - $70 an hour it was common that the top guy would be getting $20 - $23 an hour, slowly shop rates have gone up while tech pay has not gone up near as much. Now, few shops will pay more than about $40. you might find a dealers doing $45 for the best guys. And nearly all shops pay flat rate now. Flat rate pay has issue, but was once a system that was decent at least, but it's changed to a system basically designed to short change the tech, and encourage poor work done quickly. Some shops, will do this: Say the book time on a job calls for 1.2 hours, shop marks it up to 1.6 hours because they are running labor matrix, you can darn well bet the tech is only seeing the 1.2, worse yet if the shop knows the average real world time of a job is .8 then they are paying the tech "average job rate". In that scenario the shop just charged the customer twice the amount of time they paid the tech. Pretty dirty BS IMO. Of course not all shops are doing that stuff, but it's out there.
No reading between the lines is necessary. He's primarily building "racing transmissions" these days, so of course he's going to focus on the stronger transmission to work with. 4L80e's are the new TH400s in my mind. Nobody chose a TH350 over a TH400 for their race car before the modern transmissions were introduced.
