GrummanDude
Joined: 15 Jan 2006
Posts: 926
Location: Auburn, CA
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 Posted: Thu Dec 31, 2009 11:19 am Post subject: Good Story (was: Project plane) |
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Speaking of magnetos going bad . . . .
Sam Sun became one of my customers a couple of years ago. He had flown to Washington to see his girlfriend and was on his way back to his home in San Diego. He was flying back on a Sunday night in the summer of 2007.
I had been visiting a friend in Forest Hill and was driving across the bridge about the time the sun was going to set (the Forest Hill bridge is one of the highest bridges in the U.S., Vin Diesel drove a Corvette off the bridge in the movie, "Triple X").
The Auburn airport is only a few minutes from there so I decided to drive to the airport, drive out on the ramp, and watch the sun set. I got to the airport just before 9pm and got in place on the ramp for the sunset.
Just as the sun was setting (Sun, get it.) I saw a Tiger on final for runway 7. I'm thinking to myself, "Wow, that was awesome."
The Tiger taxied past me, sitting in the back of my Tahoe, and down around the parking area. When he came back, possibly to take-off again, I got out and walked up to the plane to see if he needed help.
Sam opened his canopy and said, "I'm looking for Gary Vogt of AuCountry." I said that's me and had him follow me back to my hangar.
Sam was stressed to the max. The right mag of his LASAR system had quit about Mt Shasta. Flight following wanted him to land in Redding or Red Bluff. He decided to fly to Auburn instead. He'd flown the last hour on one mag.
SO. I got his plane into my hangar, collected his things, and had him in the Comfort Inn by 10pm.
I ended up doing a LASARectomy on the plane and put in new mags.
A couple of months ago, Sam came back for his owner assisted annual and guess what? After the annual, the right mag didn't work. He had almost 500 hours on it so we pulled it. Luckily, now, we have Magneto Andy in Auburn. Andy specializes in Slick mags. The points had failed so Andy replaced them.
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Return customers: I have about 35 regular customers. It varies year to year. It takes about 3 years to totally recover from years of shitty maintenance without making the owner go bankrupt. My most expensive annual to date just to make the plane airworthy, not perfect, is $14,000. The most expensive annual with firewall forward restoration, new eyebrow, panel overlays and new avionics: $80,000. The cheapest annual was an owner assisted annual on a plane I've maintained for 6 years and taught the owner what to do and when: $700 (including repacking the wheel bearings and cleaning/gapping the plugs).
In 25 years, I have only turned away one customer. Or, to put it bluntly, refused to work on their TIger. This particular owner constantly second guessed everything I did. She even took it to different mechanics to see if what I was telling her was right. It was only after I found a 3 inch crack in her engine block and she chose to fly the plane instead of fixing it, that I decided not to work on her plane. Her reason, "Well, the engine only has 300 hours on it since overhaul. Why should I get a new block? I can just get this one welded. That what the guys at **** say I can do. They said new block is a waste of money."
Truth is, the engine never had a real overhaul. The bank that repossessed it had had a local guy in New Jersey do a quick and dirty overhaul to sell the plane. This is the same plane that had the cracked/splintered fiberglass landing gear. (Remember that story from about 7 years ago?)
I talked to her after she got the block welded and the plane back in the air. It cost her $19,000. Turned out the crank was bad, the cam was bad, and it had several bent rods. She still had the block welded and the whole thing put back together. After that, I decided that maybe I wasn't the right person to be taking care of her plane.
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Gary
AuCountry Aviation
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