Tone wheel failure

[shoden]

A couple weeks ago my brother took his SVX in to the local dealer to get the rear wheel bearings replaced. Two days and a bit of drama later (he'd bought the bearings online and they tried to charge over $800 in just labor), he picked up his car and drove home.

The next morning, while driving to work, he heard a bang and metal crunching, and the left rear wheel locked up. The total distance driven since getting the car fixed was maybe 25 miles. He had the car towed back to the dealer, and the next day he and I went down to the dealer to see what went wrong.

When the tech that had previously worked on the car put it up on the lift and removed the wheel and loosened the rotor, chuncks of metal fell out. Upon removing the rotor, everything inside the hub was chewed up and destroyed:



The tech said the tone wheel had come apart and shredded everything, and he said it was probably his fault since he was rushed and probably forgot to tighten the bolts that hold the tone wheel in place. He also said that the dealer would pay for the repairs, which included replacing the entire hub, a new wheel bearing, the parking brake assembly, ABS sensors, and of course a new tone wheel.

A week and a half later (today), my brother got a call from the service manager and was told that there wasn't enough proof that the tone wheel failure was their fault, and that the dealer would only cover 50% of the repairs!

So, my question is: Has any one had a tone wheel just fail? From what I've seen on the board, the only broken tone wheels have been the result of over tightening and the failure has occured while the work was being done. The service manager is claiming that the tone wheel is a brittle part and that failures are common.

Second, assuming that the service manager is a piece of lying dishonest scum, what can we do? This isn't the first problem we've had there (http://www.subaru-svx.net/forum/show...ht=timing+belt), but I thought things had gotten better when I was working there late last year. Apparently though things have gotten much worse in the past month since this new service manager was hired.