Lakeside Small Engine Repairs

Initially, I was really pleased with their service.  They picked up and dropped off our lawn mower and snow blower, and cleaned and tuned both machines.  The choke knob on the snow blower was broken, and they repaired it.  The price was reasonable, and they did the work quickly.  I ran the lawnmower soon after its return, and it ran fine. 

However, I didn't have reason to start up the snowblower until a couple of months later.  We found that the side of the auger casing had been bent inwards and was hitting the auger.  This must have happened when they brought it back to us in their pickup truck.  I had noticed when they first picked the machines up that they did not secure them in the back of the truck at all, so perhaps on the return trip the snowblower was banged around.  We tried to straighten out the casing ourselves, but the machine still was not functioning properly.  We had a terrible time with communication this time, I could never reach the right person to speak to and messages seemed to get lost.  After a few days of back-and-forth, the machine was picked up and returned to us again, and they said they removed a rock from inside.  But the machine STILL isn't right, because it turns out the the skid shoes are broken (perhaps from bouncing around in the truck?) and the auger is hitting the ground.  We had tried to tell them before they picked it up the second time that we thought the auger was still hitting something.  But they missed this completely and declared the machine to be just fine.

Sorry to say I would not go back to them after this experience.