If IO-540- talks to the avionic shop who worked on his autopilot last year, he may be surprised to hear that a TAS system can be installed for under £12K where an FAA AML STC exists, and that a G500 definitely does not cost £45k!
Wigglyamp...
I thought for a while before posting this, since I have zero interest in upsetting somebody who I may one day need the services of [again], and I am only about 50% sure that I know who you are... although I am about 75% sure I know which avionics shop you work for.
If you are who I think you are, you are far and away the most technically competent avionics bloke I have met in the UK - and I've met a few.
The problem is that you are not always in the office. So, that "autopilot" job, which I was told would be a few hours, and I
know (having watched it before elsewhere) should take less than a working day, was done by people who were somewhat less up to speed than you would have been, and took two days and a night in a local hotel for me. That was with considerable assistance from me, assembling a certain adaptor from a flat-packed kit, which took a few hours. Not to mention taking photographs of the servo bridle cables before their removal, enabling them to be correctly replaced.
I enjoyed doing it - electronics has been my hobby since age 6 and my profession since day 1, and I like to know my plane. But I talk to many owners and cannot help observing that "project management" does just occassionally tend to be somewhat sub-optimal in this game, and consequently the costings tend to be somewhat less precise than one may have originally anticipated... or, indeed, had received as a quotation. In fairness to you, on that AP job, following my request you did take the various factors into account on the final bill, but it still cost me a helluva lot more, all included, than I expected.
Of course, I may have got the wrong avionics shop, but it should not matter since I don't actually know who you are and neither does anybody else here.
In a similar vein, not every customer has a detailed understanding of inter-vendor interoperability limitations and it is thus not unknown for some people to get a slight suprise when their £30k refit is not quite as fully integrated as they may have expected...
I therefore hope that you understand why I have a habit of issuing various words of caution to the (apparently many) people who have £30k burning a hole in their pocket
I was quoted 48k euros by Socata in France for installing a G500 and a GNS430. I am sure they would do a good job; anybody who can screw a G1000 into a TBM850 cannot be that bad. But I absolutely bet my boots that that price is the base figure and doesn't include any "extras", and the resulting downtime would be long enough to do an engine overhaul at the same time. One UK avionics shop (yours?) published an "advertorial" the other week in which a base cost of £25k was mentioned for a G500, which is in a similar ballpark considering that a GNSx30 is mandatory for the G500.
For reasons I don't fully understand, many of these big jobs tend to over-run on time, over-run on cost, under-deliver in terms of functionality, or under-deliver in legal capability approvals.
To minimise the chance of this happening, the customer needs a clear understanding of what he is getting, but (speaking of avionics shops generally; not yours) I tend to find that the more I learn about something, the more I realise that what somebody is quoting for is pretty unlikely to be the final working version. And "you" (if indeed it is "you") still haven't done a quote for that last thing I asked about