In 21 years of doing business, Doug McKibbon has pretty much seen it all when it comes to working on cars at Doug's Transmission & Auto Repair in Talladega, Ala.

Asked about to describe some of his more memorable encounters with customers, McKibbon hesitated, oh, maybe half a second before coming up with one. Seems a guy brought a car in that he'd been working on himself. Things weren't going well, so he finally called in the cavalry.

McKibbon couldn't believe what he saw.

"Well ... I had a guy bring me a truck one time. He said he'd put heads on it and couldn't get the thing to act right," says McKibbon. "Water kept running out of it, running hot, skipping. Come to find out, after I pulled it [the engine] out, he never even put head gaskets on it. He just took some glue and glued the heads on it."

Just for the record, gluing the heads on an engine isn't exactly standard procedure in the automotive repair industry. There have been numerous other instances where McKibbon has seen evidence of people having been sold, for lack of a better term, lemons.

"I've been through so many [cars], I've seen just about everything there is to see in one," McKibbon says with a laugh. "People would go to car sales, bring 'em back and then complain about noise in them. They'd have felt hats cut up and banana peels shoved in the rear end.

"I've had motors that were running on five cylinders. You can fool with everything ... change plugs, check the thing and then finally get around to compression. You'd figure it'd be a valve or ring or something. They had just took the piston and rod out of it, and [instead] took a four-by-four [piece of wood] and whittled it down, made it round and drove it in the hole to keep it from blowing oil."

Uh ... yeah. That's not exactly acceptable, either.

Doug's Transmission & Auto Repair specializes, obviously, in transmission work. Still, that's not all McKibbon does.

"I do a little bit of all of it," he says. "I do motors, transmissions ... pretty much whatever it takes to make a dollar nowadays. ... I really like the older stuff. This new stuff, I think it's kinda complicated and drug out. They're making a bunch of stuff to sell. They don't really fix nothing to work on no more. They just make disposable stuff. ... It's hard to say. They come in spurts. You're liable to get five of one thing one week and five of something else the next week."

Customers won't be taking home heads that have been glued to engines, bananas or felt hats. As much as maybe any other business, trust is a huge factor in a repair shop's success ... or failure.

"I fix [a customer's car] just like I'd fix my own," continues McKibbon, a longtime Earnhardt fan who's pulling for Mark Martin to win the championship this season. "I don't send no junk out. I fix anything like I'd fix it for my own car, my son's or my wife's. I've been in this business 21 years, and been fooling with stuff about 35 years. I've been doing it since I was a kid.

"I grew up on junkyards and service stations and car lots. That's basically all I've done all my life. You've got to know a little bit about something. It just comes natural to me. I grew up in it. It's all I've ever done."