Wish I found this thread earlier... I had the misfortune of sending my high-end Teac cassette deck to Skywave Repair (Sam Palermo) almost a year ago. Since then, my experience mirrored the ones described above to the letter. The guy claimed that the deck was in far worse shape than it actually was, that he had tons of higher priority projects going, etc. After months and months of waiting, I gave up and asked him (multiple times) to return the deck back to me, unrepaired, at my expense. Now he is just ignoring my emails. What a crook. I filed a complaint with BBB, don’t know what else to do at this point...