just saying it should at least come in a narrow white box. the one they sold 65 might have been used.
65, did they do the install or did you? im assuming they just handed you a bare shifter and sent you on your way?
Ironically he didn’t want to deal with JHM because he said they have bad service. So he bought from his local shop who sell JHM parts.
Strange that he hasn’t replied in 2 days. Maybe the AZ thread has been updated
Sorry for the late response, not on this forum as much even though it has less bullshit then the other one lol. Shifter came in a bag but was missing the remaining parts. I am 99% positive the shifter was brand new, there was not a mark on it. I ordered this back in December during the sale as RS said they would honor the sale. Told them I was in no rush since I was about to go on a week of TDY and then 2 weeks of Vaca and knew I would not get around to installing it. What I was told is they ordered a number of things from JHM and received everything at once. I also ordered solid bushings and spacers with I received all parts for and additionally received the by pass kit which I didnt order. Either way RS got me the parts I was missing, got it installed this weekend. Love it, feels great and Im sorry I didnt get it sooner. I havent been driving my car much lately anyways.
At first I had issues setting up the shifter, reverse was a bitch but then realized I didnt put the 4 quarter inch spacers in and that solved everything. After that it was about 10 minutes of tuning the shifter. As I have always said JHM has great products, I have just not had the best experience with their customer service and prefer not to deal with it.
It’s a crazy different feeling to stock. I always just thought it shortened the throws a little but holy shit it changes the feel drastically.
Yea I was surprised how much it shortens it as well, I have only put about 30 miles on it if that but the first few I was hesitant because I was unsure if it was actually in gear lol.
In regards from bad service, I had my car down for upwards of 5-6 weeks after getting my tune updated. Sent the ECU back 6 times. It was a frustrating experience and what made it worse was the lack of communication, repeated promises to call back and not receiving them etc. You can read a brief version with a lot of fluff left out. They did end up shelling out close to 1K on dealer repairs and reimbursing me for towing/vagcomming etc which I was impressed with.
http://www.audizine.com/forum/showthread.php/508679-Some-Updates
Wow that’s shit. What happened? Is your car weird?
I decided to take my car out of “winter storage” for a drive yesterday. Now, even the JHM shifter doesn’t feel that “short” to me! I guess I’ve gotten used to it. Couldn’t imagine going back to stock now…it would probably feel like I am shifting a big rig.
So, you’ll get used to the shorter throw soon. And then every other car will probably feel like crap.
I wanted LA on the tune so I sent it in. I had a tune from around 2010 so they updated it and switched it to the new flash software, I was one of the first at the time because they called to let me know what they were doing and to keep it a little hush hush cause it wasn’t official yet.
When I got the tune I had no throttle. They said thats not possible yada yada you need to vag the car and adapt the throttle body. Pay someone to come to my house to throttle reset. Have JHM on the phone for all this to walk the guy through what he needs to do. Didn’t work, so then they start telling me its probably one of your sensors that is causing the throttle body to not work properly they will call right back. Hour later no call while this guy is at my house getting paid. So I finally call them back and they still don’t have any answers for me. It would have been nice to get a call though so I can let this guy with Vag get out of here. Following week when they get back to me they think its the throttle sensor therefore the throttle body isnt working. I could hear the throttle body in accessory mode and even took video to confirm. At that point they decided it must be something with the tune. So it was over night shipped back to have the chip replaced because they thought it was damaged but they had never seen anything like this. But they are going to replace the chip for free and I should be grateful because of how expensive they are. Shipping is on my dime though.
Get it back and the car starts up for about a second and shuts off. Goes in to safe mode. Call them up and they say to send it back, the tune must have not loaded properly. Well I was not about to sell out $60 again to overnight it back, don’t they check this stuff? Get them to agree to cover shipping.
Get it back again and it is still doing the exact same thing and at this point im like wtf? >:( I go through it with them some more back and forth trying to reprogram the keys and diagnose the problem. They tell me I need to have it taken to the dealer to have the keys reprogrammed because they think the immobilizer is rejecting me keys for whatever reason now.
Get to the dealer same day (Saturday) explain the problem and they surprisingly begin working on it right away (They were about to close). Work on it for about an hour past closing and tell me they can’t get anywhere with it. Keys are programmed like they are supposed to be but they can’t get any further into the tune because it is likely locked by JHM. Following week they go through a bunch of stuff again on the phone with Jay and a number of other guys. They determine that the tune needs to get set back to stock so the dealer can get in to it, they tell the dealer I need to send it back. I get a call at the end of the day from the dealer asking when I was going to come move the car. HUH? They explain everything that is going on and that I would have to send the ECU back to the company but they don’t have much room on the lot to have the car sitting around for weeks. Why has JHM not contacted me to let me know this. I call them and they need to go check on it and call me right back. Left work early to drive an hour to the dealer to remove the ECU my self since the dealer had closed at this point. Still nothing from JHM so I need to call them back again. At this point I am getting annoyed at the lack of communication I am getting from JHM. I think we were going on 2-3 weeks of the car down. Calls weren’t getting returned and it seemed impossible to get a hold of the person who was “familiar and dealing” with my situation as they said. Everyone in the office was well aware of what was happening because of how many times I have had to call in the last couple weeks lol. I wanted to speak to Jay or their tech guy so I can get more answers and not keep having a message passed along and distorted. They wont let me because they are busy yada yada. Finally get Jay’s email to express how frustrated I was. At this point I was shelling out money with no promise of being reimbursed or compensated in anyway. Shipping, paying someone with vag, towing and the worst was the dealer labor that was being tacked on.
The dealer gets it back again and at this point are busy and working on it when time is available even while I haggle them trying to find out if they got anywhere. They still can’t get the ECU to work and end up spending an hour or two on the phone with Jay going line by line through the immobilizer to find out that it has been corrupted some how. So its time for ANOTHER new ecu. This time a stock one is sent and the dealer is able to pair everything up and the car is running again. Its on a stock tune though. They set me up to get tuned at Prime following this. All in all it was about 5-6 weeks of my car sitting in my garage and the dealers lot. Close to $1k between shipping it back and forth 6 times, towing and about 5 hours of dealer work. Like I said Jay did agree to reimburse me for everything and told me I would get nice discounts in the future. We’ll see if they honor that on a supercharger lol Id rather get an RS4 at that point I think.
Even at Prime they had a pretty difficult time trying to tune the car. Well what they (JHM) have since found out (I know this because it happened at Prime Motoring a few times as well) is that the program they use to flash the tune crashes for lack of better words. But in reality it is still running its just that the program window closes out and would appear to have crashed. You have to basically leave it alone and let it keep doing its thing otherwise it doesn’t fully load and you end up with no throttle. It happened once at Prime and took them about 4 hours to get the tune to go through. Once again I think I was one of the first in the country to get flashed and the first at Prime and was still a test subject of sorts. Following my problem about 5-10 other posts popped up on the Zine in regards to people receiving their tune and having no throttle. So something was screwy with the tune and I think JHM learned a lot of what NOT to do with my case. Like I said great products but to me it seemed as if they had WAY to much on the table. I know they are trying to push out a TON of products and are really the only B6/B7 S4/RS4 support out there I just had a bad taste in my mouth after that situation.
Yea Im sure I will, I have a B5 a4 as well and that thing is full of slop.
What a bummer that was. I can see why you’d be hesitant lol.
Sucks to be at the front of technology. Shit never works the first time.
When I was the guinea pig car for the development of b7 s4 launch control I had a couple of different chips to try. One of them wouldn’t let me rev past 5500rpm in any gear lol. That was a bit of a downer! But I expected it. You shouldn’t have had to deal with that. Their habit of no contact for stretches can be frustrating. They need to learn the bill Gates principle theory of management…that bad news must travel quickly within the organization so they can deal with problems…and even if it’s bad, you need to keep your customers in the loop.
I drove a stock S4 with a stock steering wheel and shifter and I truly did feel like I was driving a bus. And now I’m so used to the short shifter that I wish it were even shorter 
Axle do you have an aftermarket/rs4 steering wheel?
He has TTRS
Indeed.
Fucking christ, a good pair of snap ring plyers will save you a lot of time and headache on this job. Anyone have any brand recommendations?
I just bought a pair from the local auto parts store. Came with like 10 different tip accessories and it was reversible. Made the job very easy. I did try to use a pair that was to small at first and gave up after 15 minutes and got in the car.
I used craftsman snap ring pliers and things were still a PITA. This was primarily because I was removing the small snap ring at the top of the pushdown spring as doing this made installation easier (lining up that linkage bolt) and also allowed me to switch to a stiffer spring. It wasn’t removing the snap ring that was a pain…it was reinstalling it while trying to compress the spring/shifter assembly at the same time in a not so great angle while in the car.
The whole time I was convinced that I was going to shoot that snap ring somewhere deep into the confines of my car and never find it again. It did shoot off a couple times but thankfully I got it all working.
Haha, I got so angry at the cheap pair today that I threw them across the room and they stuck in the sheet rock 
Bought a “heavy duty” set from Autozone that did the job. Yes, reinstalling the snap ring for the spring mechanism is a big pain in the ass. I was raging when I finally got it done.
Always have the same problem myself. I finally invested in a comprehensive set of various sized internal and external snap rings and e-rings for those times when I lose one.
I just asked JHM to install the stiffer reverse spring. Sounds like a good option, so…why not?!