Barnes & Walsh

I can’t even begin to describe my disdain for this place. All I can say is, he will try to salvage any car, even if it’s not worth it and/​or you don’t want it anymore. I’d advise you to keep driving if you find yourself in the vicinity and need some work on your car.

Not the best customer service, nor the best job. We had to return multiple times for silly little repairs. Moreover, we’ve just had the car re-​serviced and they indicated that the Barnes & Walsh job was not especially professional. There was filler everywhere. That was surprising since George requested additional money above the insurers payout.

Honestly, I have waited too long before getting around to writing this. I use Unilocal to help me figure out where to get things done in this town but when I was rear-​ended in March, I was in a state and was told by Mike at Mike’s Automotive to get my car to George. He not only did a beautiful job on my infiniti, making it look brand-​new where it was fixed and yet totally seamless with the rest of the car so you’d never know it was in an accident, but also, he dealt with that &^%$#@ insurance adjustor for me (who wanted to total a fantastic car that I would never be able to replace at the amount they were insisting on!!). I don’t know exactly what George did or how he did it but the insurance company paid and I got my car back. (Get this, though — I had to pay for ½ the bumper because the guy only damaged ½ the bumper. Who replaces only ½ a bumper!!! They don’t sell them in ½! Why does our state legislature let them do this!!!)
But most important, the car is beautiful. Even my neighbors noticed.

Me not being from MA, I didn’t know where to take my car after I had a accident with significant body damage to front driver’s side. My bad luck brought me to Barnes and Walsh. I only spoke with George on the phone and we went over my insurance policy, basically that I had a $ 1000 deductible but he thought my 2000 Solara was in great condition and would be worth the investment. I thought so too so I said to go ahead and fix it. First complaint was the car was not ready in the time (1.5 weeks) that he promised me. Second complaint was when he called me to tell me my car was ready, he informed me he only took cash or check. What sort of business knows you are going to owe at least 1k and doesn’t inform you that they don’t take credit cards before they do the work?
Next I went to pick up my car with and wrote him a check. The car did look great on the exterior so they get credit for that. Later that day he called me to tell me I wrote the wrong amount on the check. So I stopped by on my way to work the next day to bring him a new check. When I got there he pulled out a check, that was somebody else’s. He couldn’t find mine! So I went ahead to work and he called later to tell me he found my check and it was the correct amount. Then the next day I got another call. They had taken out everything in my trunk to use my spare tire to drive the car to the body shop and realized the forgot to put everything back in my trunk. I hadn’t looked in my trunk since picking up the car so I didn’t notice. Meanwhile I noticed when I made a sharp right turn the driver’s front tire was making a terrible squeak. So I brought my car back to George so he could take a look. He called me later and said he took it for a drive and didn’t notice anything. So I had to take the bus to the shop and drive it for him to demonstrate the squeak. So he did some more work, free of charge, and it seemed to go away for a day. Then I drove the car on the highway and noticed that it would start to shake at 60mph. They had put a new tire on the front drivers side and not balanced the rest of the tires. He told me insurance wouldn’t cover that so I called the insurance and they told me different. So I took it back to George and they fixed that. Meanwhile the squeak came back, even worse. I left my car with him another day and he called and told me that it was the steering rack? That is was really old, had a leak and was very expensive to replace and not covered by insurance. That was the final straw. I Unilocaled other mechanics and took my car to Alewife Automotive this morning. They looked my car over and said the brakes had just been tightened too much. They took care of it free of charge. I will be taking my car there from now on. Do NOT go to Barnes and Walsh.