Maybe my recent professional service experience can help someone else make an informed decision as to where to take their Land Rover in the NW.
My wife took our Discovery II to PDX Rovers (an hour and a half from our home) for a major scheduled service in December. We had 75k on the clock and, other than plenty of brake jobs, we'd been pretty lucky with it. The crew at PDX Rovers took care of the service the day of our appointment and sent us on our way.
The next week we had some issues with codes indicating misfires on two cylinders. This was not a problem we had previously encountered. I switched plugs (from the irridiums they installed to NGKs) and the wires and we were back on the road without issue.
Yesterday, I went to change the oil for the first time since the service at PDX Rovers. I drained the pan and then tried to loosen the filter. I had no luck. So I tried a filter wrench (cap style and band style), still no luck. Through these attempts I had applied enough torque that it badly damaged the filter. At this point I was committed to finishing the job as I couldn't trust the filter to hold oil enough to drive it to a shop. I bought a plier style filter wrench and tried again... the filter was torqued on so tight that it actually broke the wrench. After about 4 hours of fiddling I had the filter off (in a dozen pieces).
Today I took the hour and a half drive to Portland to visit Francis at his shop. I brought the pieces of the filter with me in a bag to show him the level of difficulty I had removing it. I wanted to ask if he would be willing to reimburse me for the cost of the wrench I needed to remove the filter and that had subsequently broke. When he walked in the door, before I could say a word, he told me he wasn't giving me anything. He said his son (the receptionist) had called him and told him what I wanted and that there was no way. I tried to explain my story several times (calmly with plenty of sirs and pleases) and was told several times that he'd never seen anything like this ""idiocy,"" wasn't going to give me anything, and couldn't believe that I would ask him for anything. All this while his receptionist stood by and recorded our conversation on his i-phone. Then Francis asked me to leave, which I did (still calmly).
This is my experience with PDX Rovers and Francis. Take from it what you like.
-Peter
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