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The Buck Stops Where?

DonFromTX

Well Known Member
Just ordered a new 500x5 inner tube from Vans, priced at $56 or so. After ordering, i thought to check for better prices, and found this: Chief Aircraft $79, Aircraft Spruce $59, Sky Geek $90 and Wal Mart $5.97.
This got me to thinking, what do I get for the extra bucks? The tube I recently took off (I must assume was an original kit tube from Vans) had absolutely no markings on it whatsoever and failed early in life.. I have 6 of the suckers spread on two planes, and they all leak. Since it obviously costs about $3 or less to manufacture one, just who is getting all those dollars we spend to get a tube we call aircraft that leak badly? Since a couple of the above sellers are selling the exact same tubes for vastly different prices, a lot of the dollars we spend are simple profit to the sellers. Anyone care to try to explain why this is the way it is?
 
I had the honor of landing a Cherokee 140 rental a few weeks ago with a flat nose wheel .. not a lot of fun .. Wal Mart shouldn't be on that list, you can probably assume the QC is an order of magnitude less. At least with products specific to aircraft you have a reasonable assumption that safety was a concern for the manufacturer.
 
Michelin Air Stop tubes

With Michelin Airstops and nitrogen I can go over one year between inflation checks. 50 PSI for the F1 rocket with 540.

Even using air with a bicycle pump I am Ok for most of a year. I just top them off before -20C arrives.
 
Someone is getting paid a lot of money for a little bit of paperwork...

I also think a huge contributor to "aviation" prices is liability insurance.

Alex
 
Because it says "Aviation", nothing more - nothing less. The same as aviation tire prices. What you get? Screwed!

I just had to fix a Jasco alternator on my D17. After taking the big shell off the Jasco alternator I found a small Prestolite 60 Amp alternator underneath, pretty much a Delco. I replaced the two cheap diode plates and I was back in business. Anyway, Jasco Alt = $1500 (Aviation), under the cover Delco = $100 (Auto). I once replaced an A/C compressor on a 310. The compressor came from Cessna in a box that said Cessna with a tag. Inside the box was a smaller box that contained the compressor, this box said Toyota. The Cessna price was over $700, that was 15 + years ago. What do ya think Cessna paid for it?
 
Canada eh

If you guys are unhappy with The price of aircraft parts, try coming to Canada and shopping with a $.80 dollar,,,, we have to be thrifty to keep-em in the air when most GA airports are charging $2 / litre ( (7-$8 per US gallon) so when cruzzing Doug site a year ago I saw that Desser tire had a Black Friday special were every tire they sold got a free leak guard tube thrown in with the deal! I ordered a set of skins for my 6 and since shipping was free it cost me $130 which is a deal when ACS Canada charged me $100 for my last 5:00-5. :)
 
I had the honor of landing a Cherokee 140 rental a few weeks ago with a flat nose wheel .. not a lot of fun .. Wal Mart shouldn't be on that list, you can probably assume the QC is an order of magnitude less. At least with products specific to aircraft you have a reasonable assumption that safety was a concern for the manufacturer.

You don't see at least a little inconsistency in having the high dollar 'aircraft quality' tube fail, and assigning blame for poor quality to Wal Mart? ;-)

Take a long hard look at crankshafts. Both Lyc & Cont have had big issues (Cont *twice* on the same design). When's the last time you heard about any automotive, industrial, agricultural, etc engine having a crankshaft issue?

As others have pointed out, many components used in certified a/c come straight of automotive and other production lines. (That stuff usually 'just works'.) I used to fly a Swift. One of the common 'undocumented' mods among Swifters was to replace the guts of the weak, unreliable 'certified' hydraulic pump (which was almost certainly originally sourced from some non-aviation production line) with the much higher quality & more powerful guts from a certain marine outdrive tilt pump.


Charlie
 
Darn glad we have all those choices. Buy and use whichever you like! If Wal-mart works for you, use it. For those who are more comfortable with other sources, that's great, too. I'm just glad we have so many options. 🤑
 
That was a heck of a sale, I too took advantage of it,I have three tires and tubes on the shelf! I went for the retreads too!

If you guys are unhappy with The price of aircraft parts, try coming to Canada and shopping with a $.80 dollar,,,, we have to be thrifty to keep-em in the air when most GA airports are charging $2 / litre ( (7-$8 per US gallon) so when cruzzing Doug site a year ago I saw that Desser tire had a Black Friday special were every tire they sold got a free leak guard tube thrown in with the deal! I ordered a set of skins for my 6 and since shipping was free it cost me $130 which is a deal when ACS Canada charged me $100 for my last 5:00-5. :)
 
My original post was not to rehash the screwing we get, but to see if anyone had any ideas WHO is getting rich!
I feel sure if Vans could get these tubes for a lower price, they would pass it on to us, I highly doubt they are paying 3 or 4 dollars for them. Somebody in the middle is simply getting rich off of us. Would be nice to expose them.
 
TSO = technical service order / PMA = parts manufacturing authority. The companies that are paper working with the FAA get to attach an extremely expensive paper tag on a component with one of those abbreviations so evidently the little tags are made of UNATANAMUM which very rare and hard to source.
 
TSO = technical service order / PMA = parts manufacturing authority. The companies that are paper working with the FAA get to attach an extremely expensive paper tag on a component with one of those abbreviations so evidently the little tags are made of UNATANAMUM which very rare and hard to source.

Did you mean "unobtainium" ?
 
TSO = technical service order / PMA = parts manufacturing authority. The companies that are paper working with the FAA get to attach an extremely expensive paper tag on a component with one of those abbreviations so evidently the little tags are made of UNATANAMUM which very rare and hard to source.

That?s it, exactly. It?s a double whammy: it makes parts expensive, and, due to the high up-front cost to obtain the TSO, discourages competition.
 
That’s it, exactly. It’s a double whammy: it makes parts expensive, and, due to the high up-front cost to obtain the TSO, discourages competition.

Na, I don't buy that.. There's planes that have been built and all the parts TSO PMA'd centuries ago and part prices is still outrageous. They see us as rich guys flying rich guy toys. In the old days there were lots of parts makers but now there's less than a handful. The parts have different names but the maker is the same. Take Pba batteries for example, there used to be many companies making batteries, now only a few world wide. They call the price and they keep it high. How many tire / tube makers do you really thing there are in this world? I bought a tail wheel tube for my D-17, a tiny 10" tube.. $100!! The little tire is $205.. For a little rubber tire. They don't fool me.

One of the best things of Experimental is that we don't have to use TSO / PMA's part. We can actually use much better and much less expensive parts. But there are some parts we have to get screwed over, like tires. I'd bet dollars to donuts a tube from ACS and the same tube from Wallymart came from the same factory. They cost pennies to make regardless of the name on the box.

Who used to buy Chen tires (11X4) for 14 bucks... Then in one day they went to 35 bucks.. Same tire, same factory. Just open an ADS-B receiver and tell me where a $1000 worth of parts are?? Aviation..
 
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Don't forget the cost of liability insurance to sell anything marketed for aviation use. A single lawsuit could cost the manufacturer of a product millions of dollars, even if it wasn't really their product to blame, and even if they win (usually cheaper just to settle). The same reason other manufacturers will plug their ears and run away as soon as you ask them about using their product in an aircraft.

There isn't a lot of risk in selling inner tubes to wheelbarrow owners. Once you start selling them to airplane owners, you open a huge can of worms. And if you don't think anybody could find a way to implicate an inner tube in an airplane crash, I'm sure there's a lawyer out there who would be happy to try. It only takes one incident to add a lot of money to the cost of a product, especially at the relatively low volumes seen in the aircraft world as opposed to automotive.

Chris
 
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Na, I don't buy that.. There's planes that have been built and all the parts TSO PMA'd centuries ago and part prices is still outrageous. .

That's exactly correct. Here's how it works: TCM is the only source for valve-train pushrods in an O-470. They cost an outrageous price. Why doesn't Superior or someone else jump into the market? Because getting a PMA or STC would cost them $100k, and they know TCM would respond by lowering their price. TCM could sell them at cost, since the PMA costs were long ago amortized. But Superior can't sell them at cost - they need to make $100K just to break even. TCM would quickly drive them out of business. So they need to be selective, entering only where there's a large market. This did happen in the mid-late (IIRC) 1980s, with cylinders. Almost overnight, new cylinder assemblies (from both the new guys and TCM) dropped from something like $4K to $1K (round numbers). The real losers were cylinder overhaul shops, who suddenly found themselves with little business. Another example is with IFR TSO'd gps. Garmin managed to corner the entry-level market when they acquired Apollo/UPS. Now, any new company faces the challenge of making a profit while paying back the $1M+ upfront TSO costs, while their competition (Garmin), having long ago paid off those development costs, can undercut their price and potentially drive them out of business. So with those risks, no one even tries. And no, neither the price of TSO/PMA'd engine parts, nor TSO'd GPS prices have dropped despite the development costs being paid. Why should they? Companies are in business to maximize profits, not to be nice to pilots.
 
Just open an ADS-B receiver and tell me where a $1000 worth of parts are?? Aviation..

For low cost items (only in aviation do we call $1K "low cost"!!) the issue is volume, and overhead. When you sell a million tv sets, the cost of engineering, management, advertising, etc., is a nearly negligible fraction of the total cost. When you only sell 1000 ADSBs per year, the cost of those items represent a significant fraction of the total cost. The cost of the parts hardly matters.
 
I have been trying to find ways around this, where I can. I can't make transponders, ADS-Bs or tires, but the bendix p-lead terminal kit is 2 ferrules, a nut, an AN washer and a small piece of phenolic. It should cost $5 but it costs $113! So I got some phenolic from McMaster and spent a very pleasant evening at the lathe. Done. Next, I ordered a new plastic oil dipstick tube. It is a 10" long piece of molded ABS plastic. $90 US. And lo and behold the cap and dipstick assembly is not a common thread between the 3 different lengths of dipstick tube. They are different, so it will cost another $100 for a new dipstick. No, I will be headed back to the lathe for that.

I guess it is tough to make a profit in aviation, so when companies can, they really go to town. That bendix terminal kit is the biggest ripoff going, and it is a horrible way to attach the shielding to the mag - no straight relief at all. Bad design, horribly over priced. We are better off rolling our own where we can.
 
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Let me preface this with the statement that I have the utmost respect and admiration for Vans and their products and methods.
That said, it would have been fun to be a fly on the wall when they discussed tires, tubes and wheels. On the one side, they looked at what we wound up with in our kits, the cost being about $651 for the RV 12, vs a huge list of tires, tubes and wheels that were probably as strong, as light, and as good a choice, for probably somewhere in the $30 to $60 range for the whole plane! I have not checked to see what other kit makers have used to reduce costs.
 
I have been trying to find ways around this, where I can. I can't make transponders, ADS-Bs or tires, but the bendix p-lead terminal kit is 2 ferrules, a nut, an AN washer and a small piece of phenolic. It should cost $5 but it costs $113! So I got some phenolic from McMaster and spent a very pleasant evening at the lathe. Done. Next, I ordered a new plastic oil dipstick tube. It is a 10" long piece of molded ABS plastic. $90 US. And lo and behold the cap and dipstick assembly is not a common thread between the 3 different lengths of dipstick tube. They are different, so it will cost another $100 for a new dipstick. No, I will be headed back to the lathe for that.

I guess it is tough to make a profit in aviation, so when companies can, they really go to town. That bendix terminal kit is the biggest ripoff going, and it is a horrible way to attach the shielding to the mag - no straight relief at all. Bad design, horribly over priced. We are better off rolling our own where we can.

Couldn't agree more! And it me its so rewarding "rolling your own". Recenetly I made a 1" thick crush plate in the lathe and mill, throttle cable bracket, and a pair of static ports. A little time consuming, but its fun and saves money for gas!
 
Aviation is plagued by two different issues.....

- The cost of liability

and

- The cost of low volume production

Put these two together and it makes prices of aviation parts seem ridiculous when compared to Walmart.

Van's has not become the premier kit aircraft seller in the world by ignoring opportunities to reduce cost. Just the opposite.

If the notion that a tire is a tire (regardless of who made it and where it was purchased) was true, then I guess it would be true for engines also, and we would all be flying RV's with an engine that came out of a wrecked car.....

P.S. I would be curious to take a look at the complete set of wheels, brakes, and tires that could be bought for only $60 to put on an RV-12. A complete set of just tires for my riding lawnmower (from Walmart) would cost a minimum of $120.
 
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Let me preface this with the statement that I have the utmost respect and admiration for Vans and their products and methods.
That said, it would have been fun to be a fly on the wall when they discussed tires, tubes and wheels. On the one side, they looked at what we wound up with in our kits, the cost being about $651 for the RV 12, vs a huge list of tires, tubes and wheels that were probably as strong, as light, and as good a choice, for probably somewhere in the $30 to $60 range for the whole plane! I have not checked to see what other kit makers have used to reduce costs.

Don, I recently bought four tubes for a riding mower I converted to an airplane tug. I shopped several vendors, Walmart and Ebay included, and still spent $50 for cheap, generic tubes. New tires from Walmart online would have been more than twice that amount. Those tires have load and speed ratings waaaay too low for aircraft use......

The other kits with which I am familiar use wheels and tires from many of the same vendors Vans uses. These are safety-critical items that no kit manufacturer (or pilot!) wants to see fail. Less expensive wheels are pretty much limited to ultralights (and wheelbarrows....) and most will not accommodate brakes. I don't think many builders would want those wheels and tires on their RV-12..... ;)
 
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One of the best things of Experimental is that we don't have to use TSO / PMA's part.

^^^^^^
This is what keeps the big guys in check. What do you think a G3 would cost (if it was even available) if the likes of Dynon, MGL, GRT, et. al. couldn't enter the marketplace?
 
Part of the problem is old age. At 80 it still seems like a new car should be around $1500 yet, whatever happened there?
I got my new tube from Vans today and was surprised to actually see something written on it, never seen that before. Now this looks like maybe one that will not leak - at least not so badly.
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About half of 10 or so Leakguard tubes I've installed in the past 12 years lose about 10 psi over the course of a month after being inflated to 50 psi. The better ones only lost 3 or 4 psi.

On the Michelin Airstops I just installed new this past July, I just added 10 psi today to each to bring them back up to 50 psi. It would be great to go a year without having to add air, but doesn't seem likely.
 
About half of 10 or so Leakguard tubes I've installed in the past 12 years lose about 10 psi over the course of a month after being inflated to 50 psi. The better ones only lost 3 or 4 psi.

On the Michelin Airstops I just installed new this past July, I just added 10 psi today to each to bring them back up to 50 psi. It would be great to go a year without having to add air, but doesn't seem likely.


I've always found the Michelin's to leak far less than the Leakguards - and the Michelin's only cost a couple of bucks more (last time I checked).
 
Wow that is bad. Now I am unsure if I want to change out the tubes to the new one, might even be worse than what is in there!. It would not be so bad if I could get down on the floor, roll the aircraft around to align the valve stem, then fish thru the hole to check pressure and add air.
Getting old sure sucks.

air.QUOTE=alcladrv;1214491]About half of 10 or so Leakguard tubes I've installed in the past 12 years lose about 10 psi over the course of a month after being inflated to 50 psi. The better ones only lost 3 or 4 psi.

On the Michelin Airstops I just installed new this past July, I just added 10 psi today to each to bring them back up to 50 psi. It would be great to go a year without having to add air, but doesn't seem likely.[/QUOTE]
 
I have had many of the newer Leakguard Butyl tubes simply fail outright over the last 3 years (One hasn't gotten truly religious until one lands a Pitts S-1 with a flat main in tight wheelpants). Butyl rubber is not natural rubber. It is a synthetic rubber with the advertised advantage of being impermeable to air. Unfortunately since it is a synthetic it is basically molded similar to plastic. You can see the mold lines on the surface of the Leakguards. These mold lines are where we have found many failures of the Leakguards. So while they don't leak sitting in the hangar, they do completely fail when one of those mold lines chafe on the inside of the tire. Natural rubber does not do that. I try to avoid Leakguards. I don't have a problem with natural rubber as long as I check pressures regularly. I think the big push toward Butyl tubes has more to do with their being cheaper to produce as much as anything. And you gotta hand it to the marketing guy who thought up charging more for cheaper stuff. Brilliant.

I am glad to hear that Michelin Airstop tubes are having better success that Leakguard. I will try some Michelins next.

Here are some pointers with respect to the synthetic Butyl tubes:

1. If installing Butyl inner tubes use even more talc powder than traditional amounts. This will help with the chafing failure rate we have seen rearing it's head recently.

2. Make sure your baby powder or tire powder is in fact "talc" and not cornstarch. Most of the cheap generic brands are cornstarch. Cornstarch is made of larger particles than talc and cornstarch is hygroscopic meaning it absorbs moisture from the air. This gives it a propensity to get clumpy and sticky over time instead of dry and smooth which might be a contributing factor in the mold line chafing. Talc is made of smaller particles of clay and minerals and while it too can absorb a certain amount of moisture from the air that doesn't cause it to get sticky like cornstarch.

3. Check the air pressures in Butyl tubes often and keep pressures on the high side to minimize chafing. Low pressures exacerbate the chafing. Of course now you will be checking pressures as often as with natural rubber tubes.

I think.

Jim
 
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