What's fair here?

My 2011 I bought used 10 years ago started showing the typical signs of head gasket failure - intermittent really rough and uneven firing upon cold start, that evened out after 15 or 30 or 45 seconds or so. My shop, where I've taken my Toyotas for 25 years, found a cracked plug and replaced all four, charging $357, explaining that a lot has to be removed to get to sparkplugs. They warned me at the time that head gaskets and cracked heads are a problem, but believed they fixed the problem.

Until 3 days later, when it came back. At that point, I dug into this forum and learned for the first time of the Gen3 engine problems. Not knowing condition of the rods and pistons, knowing I had experienced the hydrolock start at least 10 times over the last few months, I decided it was time to replace the engine rather than just head gasket.

$6,200 and two months later, the work was done. As of yesterday, I've got a used not rebuilt engine from Fenix with a three year 36k parts and labor warranty. $3,750 for the engine, $250 other parts, $1,780 labor, + tax. Seemed high, but all things auto are high now. (Ford dealer recently offered me a Maverick hybrid pickup stickered at 28k - for 38k....) The Prius is otherwise in great shape: new tires, the AC still works fine, rides well. I know the car. Seemed worth it to pay about what it was worth to keep it running. (Don't think I'd do it again, if only because the car was down for two months. I don't blame the shop. The time to find an engine, install it, and three major holidays slowed everything down.)

Anyway, I reminded the shop owner that in early November I had paid $357 for four spark plugs, which turned out to be wasted money and time, and asked that the bill be adjusted. He refused. He said replacing the plugs was part of the sequence of events that led to diagnosis of the problem, that based on what they knew in November he could not justify replacing the engine then, that they had done a coolant pressure test and did not find anything leaking into the spark plug wells, and that basically, I was on the hook for the spark plugs. He did give me $100 credit for the cost of new plugs installed in the new engine, but nothing else.

Seems to me the shop should have split the cost of the November spark plug replacement with me. I don't dispute that no one really knew what the problem was then, and that there was no way to isolate the problem then, but I don't feel like I should shoulder all the responsibility for that uncertainty. I'm not the expert - but the shop is in the business of fixing cars, not me. And I was the one who found my problem described to a T in this forum. (After reading the forum, I realized replacing the cracked plug might have been a bad thing - that leaking coolant had to go somewhere.)

The owner and I go back 20 years. I've done work for him - he does work for me. I respect his business sense and his obvious pride in his work. But I feel like he was wrong on this.

What is fair here?

Ed

 

LOL. I can't argue that. I can only bitch about what I know, and the car seems to be running fine now. I suppose by focusing on the $357 I'm not thinking about the $6,200.

Car has 234k miles. EGR has never been cleaned, at least to my knowledge. I didn't discover the importance of that maintenance until my recent dive into this forum.