I’m posting this as a warning to people in the MX-5 community, so that they can avoid making the same mistake I did.
I’ve been properly shafted by a guy called Keith Locke and I want to share this in case he continues to try and scam people. He used to own a company called Rotmods UK (which he is now trying to liquidate to avoid being sued by other people he’s shafted)
I found him last year through an advert he posted on FB for engine work. Contacted him and had a good chat. He seemed knowledgeable, experienced and helpful and I booked my newly bought Trilogy in for a cam belt and water pump change at his garage in Sheffield. He sent pics and updates of the job as he was doing it and I drove away a happy customer after having a good chat about things I could do with the car and finding out he was in the process of moving his business to Chesterfield, which is where I live.
In March this year, I arranged to see him again to talk about FI options and costs. This time he was in a garage in Doncaster, temporarily sharing it with a mate after the garage in Chesterfield fell through leaving him without a premises to work from. He showed me around some builds he claimed to have done which were very impressive, told me what parts he would be using for the turbo build (Garrett hybrid, custom manifold and exhaust, 180 cell sports cat, EV14s, ME221, upgraded clutch etc etc.) and we shook hands and agreed on a price of about £4k including under-sealing the car. I transferred him half the money so he could buy the parts (stupid I know but at this point I trusted him) and about a month later he contacted me to let me know he was ready and had all the parts waiting.
I took the car to him. This time he wanted to work from his garage behind his house in Bolsover. I asked what had happened to the garage in Doncaster and he told me that his friend had not been paying the rent and so they were both kicked out, causing much loss to him. A few days before dropping my car off to him, I saw a post someone else had put up on one of the FB groups about the experience he had with Keith. It wasn’t good and I was concerned but foolishly dismissed it as a disgruntled customer and a one off mistake, thinking that if I changed my mind now, I wouldn’t get the money back I had already handed over. Keith had also posted something on his own FB page explaining some of the mistakes and said he was shutting down Rotmods. There were lots of positive comments from people encouraging him not to do this and saying how good they thought he was, further making me think that it would be OK. I asked him about closing the company down and he told me that he wasn’t certain he would, and that getting my build done would improve his confidence after a rough year.
I told him not to rush it and that I was happy for him to take his time over it (hoping this would prevent any mistakes)
Over the next 8 weeks, Keith kept me updated on progress with pics and conversations. He was recommending other mods I could make and everything appeared to be going well. I asked him to do a couple of other jobs like painting the calipers and putting in a switchable map which he agreed to do. I also asked if he could take apart the headlights and paint the inside black to give them a more modern look. (He tried this but admitted that he fucked up and melted the headlights and had replaced them with some spares that he had.) I went to see how things were going in about week 7 when he was live mapping up and down his street with someone he introduced to me as his apprentice. I dropped off a turbo blanket to go on and he said it would need a little modifying to fit but that he would sort it out.
Then finally the day came to pick up the finished car. It looked great! Engine bay and engine had been painted, it sounded great but I was disappointed with the washer bottle relocation (see pic.) and that he had managed to set fire to and destroy the turbo blanket! There was a lot of smoke in the engine bay but he reassured me that all the smoke was from the oils on the turbo/manifold etc burning off and would soon stop. We went out for a quick drive, the car felt fast and Keith was evidently proud of his work. He showed me the switch for the switchable map and told me to get used to it in low boost mode before trying it. I handed over the rest of what I owed him (foolishly in cash) and took the car the long way home. That’s when the problems began!
I pulled over at one point because the smoke from the engine bay was so bad I wanted to check it wasn’t on fire. I could tell the smoke was coming from the air intake side of the engine, not the turbo or manifold. I took it down the bypass to get it home a bit faster and tried putting it in the higher boost setting. The car just lurched forward a few times and didn’t sound good. It wasn’t boosting in either setting now. I limped it home and called Keith who came out later that day to have a look. (He lives about 20 mins from me.) He looked around and found one of the intercooler pipes had blown off and that he hadn’t blanked the EGR properly and set about fixing it. I took it out again and in low boost setting I really couldn’t tell very much difference than when it was a stock engine. It was just louder. I tried higher boost setting again, on the bypass and the car just lurched forward a few times again and after that, sounded like a tractor. Engine was fucked.
Keith came out a few days later to look and told me oil pressure was down and he would have to take it back to his to fix but reassured me the engine was fine. To cut an already long story short, after contacting the guy who I mentioned posted about his experience with Keith, and talking to the “friend” who Keith briefly shared the garage in Doncaster with, (he kicked Keith out of his garage for stealing performance parts and poorly fitting them to his own customers cars, as well as showing customers like myself around the garage owners builds and telling people that they were his builds) I contacted Keith and told him I’d lost all confidence in him and that he was not to work on my car any more. and needed to return it to me ASAP (He claimed he hadn’t done anything but diagnosis at this point.) He never did return it. I had to arrange my own transport to a well respected MX5 specialist.
Turns out Keith bought one of those cheap £500 eBay complete turbo kits from China with my money and slapped that on it. He also didn’t take the sump off to drill into it, despite having the engine out of the car. The garage fixing the car found metal filings in the engine and told me they had destroyed the oil pump and probably caused more damage elsewhere. The oil line he had put in was an amalgamation of old rubber hoses and spliced braided hoses poorly connected together with nuts They found that the clearance on 7 of the valve shims was wrong and it looked like he had taken the head off to work on the engine, despite me telling him not to. The cam belt and tensioner were not new and the belt had slackened putting the timing out by 5 degrees. The water pump looked like it had just been spray painted to give the appearance of being new. My engine, which had only covered 45000 miles was trashed and not worth fixing. The injectors are yellow RX8 type ones which I can only assume are also cheap fakes, the ECU is clearly second hand and came with a map from a different car and until I get a chance to check, I don;t even know if it’s an ME221. and from what others have said about Keith’s work, I’m fully expecting the clutch to go pretty soon.
I’ve had to spend another £2.5k on getting the car up and running again. It had a new engine and a genuine Garrett turbo fitted. I missed the best summer we’ve had in years for driving it about and I still need to spend more money on injectors, blow off valve, getting it properly mapped and save some for if the clutch goes. I don’t know if the stock rad will be up to the job and the intercooler and manifold are part of the same turbo kit so probably aren’t up to the job either. And there was never any cat fitted, it’s just a straight through pipe.
I think you can probably guess the rest. All attempts at getting any money back from Keith have failed and after contacting his (possibly) ex partner this week, he has seemingly disappeared. (I’m not 100% certain yet, that she isn’t in on this too.)
If you’ve had any similar dealings with Keith Locke or Rotmods, please DM me. I would like to get together enough people’s stories to go to the police and give them cause to take some action. If you haven’t …don’t!
I hope the admins can remove him from any of these groups and forums to make it as difficult as possible for him to start up another business and rip people off.
