Cessna Co. Rip off

[9 lives]

A long time ago, I offered to help my neighbour with his old Ford tractor. His carburettor was gummed up. I recognized is as a Marvel Schebler, similar to that on my 150, just cast iron, where mine was aluminum.

Many airplane parts are not newly invented for airplanes.

[The Ancient Geek]

It makes sense for manufacturers to raid the automotive parts bin, the parts have the economy of scale and proven reliability in the field.
The cost of designing, certifying and manufacturing a short run of maybe a few hundred door handles is horrendous, rather use as many "off the shelf" parts as possible.

[PDR1]

People don't appreciate that (a) it might be a selected or modified version of the same part and (b) even if it's used in bog-standard form it still has to be tested/stressed/certified before it can be used as an aircraft part. Quite often there are on-going batch tests/inspections etc even after the initial design costs are recovered.

That costs money, and that cost has to be recovered.

PDR

[JimCrawford]

Possibly a unique reversal to the theme of this thread:

The gas struts in the undercarriage mechanism of an LS4 are Miele washing machine parts. The quoted Meile price was 10% more expensive than the same parts from the UK LS rep - and that included the form 1.

Jim

[27/09]

even if it's used in bog-standard form it still has to be tested/stressed/certified before it can be used as an aircraft part. Quite often there are on-going batch tests/inspections etc even after the initial design costs are recovered.

I very much doubt Clyde or Pug spent much money on stress testing or any other testing on the various automobile parts (door handles, seat motors used as hydraulic pump motors etc) they used. As the OEM they would have made a quick and dirty assessment the part would do the job and go from there.

[9 lives]

As the OEM they would have made a quick and dirty assessment the part would do the job and go from there.

Is true. However, even though for certain parts the requirement to test might have been minimal to nil, the parts still had to be documented within the design of the aircraft, and put through the approval process with the FAA. Thereafter, the OEM had to regularly audit the manufacturer of those parts, to assure that they continued to conform to what had been approved (auto parts manufacturers tend to change things without telling their customers). With the parts at OEM receiving, they had to be inspected, "batched" into their airworthy parts stores, and maintained there for however long they took to sell.

If the OEM bought a hundred door handles in the 1960's, bore the cost of all of that process for them, and then sat on half of them as intended spares for all those decades, continuing to carry the cost of annual inventory, and then budgeted for the cost of warrant or liability on those parts after they were sold and documented with a Form 1, there can be quite a cost to that!

Or, the OEM could choose to no longer stock the part. Client phones the OEM needing the part and hears one of two answers: Part no longer available = 'plane grounded, or make to order = $$$$ and long lead time.

I don't know Cessna's costing formula, but using the example of a shimmy damper, if they don't have one in stock at all, and offer to make it special order, I can imagine that beginning with having to locate very old tooling for forging, and sending it out for a subcontractor to interrupt their production of something else, to set up a machine to forge one, or a few blanks, to be specially machined into parts. The subcontractor sees a RFQ from Cessna, they are not thinking "let's give a deal today"!

[Snyggapa]

This is something, where if testing / certification could be overcome, 3d printing of one off or low volume components could really come into the fore.

I don't know if every single piece of an aircraft requires certification, if not start with those. It's a good solution but if there is no practical way to certify (can a 'design' be certified from a plan and made on an approved machine or does every end product have to be tested?) then it might not fly..

[LFT]

Google 'Rantoul Kansas' on Google Earth/Maps, there's someone there who'll have just about anything you require..