Issaquah Pit Stop

John and his team have been our family mechanics for years. John works with you directly and explains in lay mans terms what’s wrong. His team has taken care of us in crisis car catastrophes and routine maintenance scenarios. I trust John with my car.

The Issaquah Pit Stop is the only place I will take my vehicles for maintenance or repairs. John is a talented mechanic with very competitive pricing and is as honest as he is talented. The best!

I have had a couple of experiences with The Pit Stop. One was a tow. That went ok but I wondered how professional the business was. Later the business moved to a rural residential location just outside Issaquah. They were able to take a quaint little horse property and turn it into the scurge of the neighborhood. There was total disregard for the neighbors. The Pit Stop could have made something cool. It validates other reviews. Typically this sort of consideration translates into a businesses overall approach to doing business. I would look somewhere else.

My new year started off with a bang! Unfortunately it was to the tune of over $ 1500. :(
My car was fine one minute and popping and smokin the next. Apparently one of the spark plugs had come loose and stripped right out of the engine. I knew it sounded expensive but I had no idea how bad.
I was towed to Pit Stop because it was close and that’s who owned the tow truck. I’ve never had my car at a shop, much less at one in Issaquah, but that’s where my car decided to bite it, so I didn’t have much of a choice.
After talking with John for awhile I got the feeling he was a genuinely good guy, I found out later that wasn’t exactly the case.
So here’s the deal…
It appears they did fix the engine, it’s still running anyway. The problem is that when I went to pick my car up they asked me why it had a front end shake to it. I told them it never had any sort of shake before, because it didn’t, so they had me take a test drive with the mechanic who worked on my car to show me. When we took the test drive the car didn’t shake so I was perplexed. The owner, John, said it might have been a rock in the tire or something and sent me on my way.
Unfortunately as soon as I got on to I-​90 the mysterious shake began and it was surprising and pretty hairy. Luckily it didn’t last too long but it happened again more frequently the next day on my way to work and I didn’t feel exactly safe driving it. I took it to Les Schwab after work and had them check the tires for me, as suggested by John. They couldn’t find the source of the problem since the mysterious shake didn’t show up when they test drove it. I contacted John and he said to bring the car in and he would take care of it. That turned out to be a false statement by him.
So to make a very long and painful story short… I had to take my car somewhere else to get the problem fixed since all John did to fix the problem was rotate the tires and tell me to get them balanced. Some mechanic he turned out to be as Firestone diagnosed the problem as a bad front CV axle, which when I replace it, fixed the mysterious shake.
So in closing, I can’t say they didn’t fix the original problem, but they weren’t very helpful fixing the issue that arose after they worked on my car. I felt they pretty much just sent me away and tried to wash their hands of the issue. I wouldn’t recommend them to anyone, unless you need a bad headache.