Unfortunately I have the similar experience as f456gt and mikeyaya with Wayne Picquet (PK) and Quads Unlimited business practices.
I live in Europe and made (I thought) a thorough investigation of possible refurbers in the UK, Germany, US and Canada during the fall of 2018.
Given the raving reviews in Stereophile, even David Chesky uses his rebuilds, supertestimonials in lots of forum threads, testing by Gary Jacobson on his great website quadesl.org, etc., it seemed that the "true ESL57 refurb guru" on this planet was PK. I was a bit suspicious that there were no testimonials after 2015 on his web page, but finally decided to trust PK with 12 panels (planned stacked 57s) and USD 3,300 paid in advance (sigh).
This was October 2018 and the estimate was "20-24 days of work". Before I shipped the panels to him, his turn-around time on email was around 24 hours, but once he got my money and panels there was almost radio silence. I gave him extra time and demanded a status report in Dec 2018 and got the brief answer "7-10 days".
Christmas and New year passed and finally on Feb 2, 2019 I finally got an answer, where he was complaining about heart surgery having wiped out a lot of money for him, that 9 customers were screaming at him (understandable) and he was just a single but determined builder.
Good news was my panels should be ready in 2 days!!
That was 6 weeks ago and now total radio silence.
Obviously wondering about his thinking and lack of ethics. Is he running a Ponzi scheme, where he is selling panels to (older) customers and letting newcomers become the losers or what? Or just collecting money with no intent to deliver back? It seems clear that at some point in time he has been doing great stuff, but he has a prove a lot to regain any kind of trust from me. There *may* be real health problems involved, but that does NOT mean that outright lies are OK.
I start to lose hope about ever getting my panels and money back, but if this thread entry helps one or more ESL57 lovers to not end up in my situation it would be worth it. Not living in the US, legal action seems like a big hassle, but if PK continues like this he is bound for class action soon or finding himself out of business (whichever is first).
(If someone thinks this is just unfair slander and fake news, I can privately send a complete audit trail on emails and payment)
