no-one will do the checks better on an aircraft than the guy who is going to fly it
How very very true
The one thing which suprised me when I first became an owner was that close to nobody working on planes had even a PPL and most would never go up in the air. Business-wise this is reasonable but in a business in which the line between "replacement" and "replacement on condition" is, for want of a better word......... occassionally just slightly blurred.... ??
The other side of the coin is that owners don't like spending money so are less likely to find things that need replacing....
True, though I suspect you will find a high correlation between owners who are stingy and owners who
don't want to get involved in maintenance... From what I have seen, the stingiest owners tend to be flying schools and they can't do their own checks anyway (PT regs). I walked out of one school due to absolutely appalling maintenance.
Practically, and even if safety is not compromised, there is a price to pay for taking shortcuts on the 50hr checks: the Annual is going to cost you more, and no normal owner can do the Annual himself.
I have been in engineering for many years and have a pretty good understanding of the issues in this, and IMHO a lot of the mythical aura around aircraft maintenance is way overdone. Anybody who can maintain a lawn mower could do 90% of the average GA spamcan Annual just by following the checklist in the maintenance manual, and the remaining 10% can be learnt, or needs special or unusual tools. The mechanical sophistication of a typical GA plane, even a high end piston IFR tourer, is well below a Vauxhall Viva and is many ways comparable to the lawn mower. It would be illegal, of course.
Most of the time is spent on removing access covers, pulling out split pins, etc. Which is why most maintenance organisations don't like pulling out split pins to grease solid bushes/bearings... a quick squirt of oil "does the job just fine"
The thing that keeps this aura going is the tight regulation of the maintenance business. However, as with all certification (whether in aviation, plumbing, domestic gas, ISO9000 and all similar crap, etc) the end job is only as good as the person doing it, and absolutely nothing is going to prevent all the boxes being ticked but the jobs not being done. Not even a duplicate inspection on every item, because "procedures" of that kind tend to be endemic within a whole company.
There are good companies and good engineers around (though a good individual is not going to be a terribly useful contact when the job is done by a company, because you never know who actually did the work) but it takes a little while to dig them out, and most owners start with zero knowledge - of both who is good/bad and of airfield politics.
When my plane was brand new, the JAR145 company (long gone now) would chew off the screws with a power screwdriver and I would quietly replace them afterwards. This was on a £600 50-hr check.
Own checks is not for everybody - most owners are not that mechanically minded - but they are a great opportunity for keeping a very close eye on one's plane (a bit like an extremely thorough preflight check every 50hrs) and will save a lot of money.