RE: Hobby King turbine!
I guess what I'd want to know more than anything, is who is actually making the engines. No different than any HK products. I don't know, does HK have their own manufacturing facility or is it a case of rebadging product from another manufacture? I don't know, that's why I'm asking, does anybody TRUTHFULLY know the answer?
Lets just say for sake of argument that these turbines were being supplied by a well known manufacture, to HK but they were able to somehow sell them for half the price (maybe the markup is that great that they could, again, I truthfully don't know). If one were to find out that these engines were being made by a reputable manufacture would they become popular?
More likely what would happen is the reputable manufacture would come under fire for selling their name brand products at a higher price instead of their brand X products at a lower price. So would the HK turbine end up selling well, would said reputable manufacture offer custom support or would that fall into the hands of HK? I will say that I have only ordered once from HK and the product was garbage. Yes they said they'd replace it once I shipped my batteries back, but the return shipping cost as much as the batteries. As such I've never been willing to take that risk again. That being the case, for me personally to want to consider an engine I would have to start seeing posts about HK like we see about companies like Dreamworks, nothing but praise . Then I would start to consider them again. It's not so much their product that has me turned off from dealing with them, it's the risk of bad product with no real recourse.
Glen, you're right, tons of people have had luck, and that's great, but for a guy like me, who ordered 2 batteries that were bad right out of the box, that is a 100% failure rate. Makes it hard to want to pull the trigger again on a less expensive product when I know of more expensive products that work. At the end of the day, I consider what part of my investment am I willing to lose? Well, when I built my Firebird, I chose the turbine with the best track record, the one that's been aroung longer than anyone, the one where I have never heard of a failure. There are other good companies out there, but what I had to weigh was, do I want a lifetime warranty, or do I want an engine that I'm more confident that I won't ever need a warranty. With a jet like the Firebird, if an engine fails, I don't just lose the engine, due to the type of airplane, I put the entire airframe at high risk. So in the case of an engine from HK, it comes down to accepted risk, and with my personal experience with HK, I don't want to take those risks.
As I say, it would be really interesting to hear who is manufacturing the engine for them, what are the build specs, tolerances, QC, etc. Then and only then would I even begin to consider one.