There are many instances where 'items' destined for the jet community are 'inflated' in terms of cost, it happens in a lot of sectors, aviation is one, boats and medical are others etc. The hook is we all want the best in our 'expensive toys'.
Festo and SMC make great fittings, interestingly Festo seem to be 'the' fitting, SMC do not, SMC make a very very good product and often more cost effective than Festo, its just the Festo name is the bling one when it comes to fittings - only you guys can change that.
Aeropoxy is another often commented product, there are alternatives, 9462 has been around for donkeys years, yes it achieved 'approval' but chemistry has moved on and products like 9464 albeit grey in colour are equally good, along with many others, the problem is getting them in a quantity that makes the price attractive, something I have tried to do but yet to find a 'partner' to help with a bulk order, it would only take a big retailer to come on board and we would see some better priced adhesives around.
Air traps, component parts are tiny, parts are all available even the famous 'white material' that is fitted on one makers unit - I'm looking to make a simple effective cheap CBT (composite bubble trap) so if this might interest some of you let me know, and I will do some prototyping and testing.

marcs

Personally I like all the little bits you can buy. A few years ago I got a proper FOD guard off Dave and its a million times better than my home made effort. Is it not like the lifestyle choices we make? We can either spend £3000 a month and send the kids to a decent private school or stick to the local state schools, buy a laser cut UAT holder or use a tie wrap? Ultimately people do what they want and what they can afford, the choices are out there so if it's too expensive don't buy it. I used to do scale accessories for the jets i built but it just wasn't worth the effort with the return I could get.

I admire the guys that make a full time living out of this industry as its not easy, I'm lucky that I build to fund my passion and I have a full time job that I love....

Alex

The internet has made price shopping so easy for new or used. HAve we become that lazy?

Asking price is just that. Your not forced to buy.




One born every minute. If your reborn regularly, you may want to change your shopping habits.

Steve

In an age were the US Federal Reserve keeps mysteriously losing billions of dollars and printing more than that, I can assure you that all of these little "bits" will continue to go up in price because of inflation. Its debt my friends. Trillions of it. And no silly little 60 billion dollar reduction is going to affect it. Congress came in with a goal of, at minimum, to reduce the debt by 100 billion dollars (which wasn't even close to being enough btw). They couldn't even eek out 60 billion. Moreover, the GBO just put out a document showing how the federal government could cut out 200 billion in wasted tax payers money today by illuminating duplicated services. No one seems to care. You think inflation was bad when Carter was in office? Just wait. These are just a few of the problems, there are thousands more. We are all in for a nasty ride.

Here's a good little video to see.
http://dailybail.com/home/there-are-...g-part-ii.html

Where are the SMC fittings available from? I can't find anywhere in the UK that stocks them

Carl, drop me a PM and what you need, I have some and can source.

marcs

Carl

RS components stock them. I just bought some manual switch off valves that were £7.44 plus vat. OK they were very large in comparison to Festo (not a problem to me) but they were lighter. Now I am buying 6 of everything for my new plane savings like that make a difference.

Perhaps there should be a thread for suggestions to save money rather than one moaning about how expensive things are.

John

O.M.G. Watch the video, second one down. They don't have a clue. Thanks for posting it Pegasus.

John, I have an account with SMC, so if your after more fittings in time let me know as it might save you a few quid.

marcs

Ah that old faithful post from Dennis, a sure sign that someone has upset him - "I see you have only made ..... posts in a year".

Personally Dennis, it doesn't matter how many posts you make, if its only 2 or 3, and they are all useful then fine.

Most of your posts are pointless, and not helpful ........so don't have a pop at people for not making "helpful posts".......you spend too much time "moaning" on here

Thanks Marc I will contact you when I need SMC fittings.

John

Hi Dennis,

Just interested in a couple of things here as I run a couple of businesses myself and margins are an interest of mine

You intimate in one of your posts that you employ about 250 staff and would not want to let them go - a point which I would be in full agreement with. However let's make some assumptions here (dangerous I know!) but if you employ 250 staff on let's say an average wage of £25,000 per annum that is an annual wage bill £6.25 million (assuming you don't take any earnings from the business). Let's also assume that you have no overheads whatsoever other than wages which would of course not be the case for a business employing 250 staff. Let's also forget about employer NI contributions so basically taking the lowest possible numbers.

If you are working on a -15% margin factoring only wages into the equation - not turnover which one would assume would be higher you are effectively running on losses of £937,500 per annum. Let's round that up to £1 million per annum of losses. Now I know and I'm sure most people out there know that no bank / private equity firm / rich father would support a situation like that, so one must assume you have enough capital employed to ride the rough times.

For a company with such a high negative gearing you would need to have at least £3 million in the bank available purely for cashflow and a capitalisation of say £6 million purely to keep going and keep credit lines open from suppliers.

Where I am going with this is, surely a company that has obviously seen good success in the past to be as well capitalised as it is would be far better off downsizing and for the sake of argument maybe losing 125 jobs but also keeping 125 jobs rather than waiting until your hand is forced and all 250 jobs have to go and you have lost millions not only causing yourself and your employees a great deal of distress but also limiting your ability to be a significant employer in the future?

Is the company you own a Limited company?

Dennis,

You must give me your contact details.

We are just about to go out to tender for 3 sites, (Aylesbury, Dartford, Egham) circa 20,000sq.ft of build and if you are working on those margins I believe you may just win the tender but can i be sure you will be actually able to do the job without going bust?



Simon

People seem to forget about the time when we all flew with analog servos ....Thinking about it I had a BVM F-4 that had only one digital servo among all and guess what ....it had one receiver one battery pack simple JR switch and flew great... If one carefully pick out his required servo needed for a particular installation you can go analog no sweat ...one doesn't always need super holding power ...30 kilo servo ....the outcome is you can skip the power-box systems dual batteries and so , not to mention that analog servos cost less even from known brand manufacturers compared to their digital ones....I operate RPV's and many of them don't have digital servos and I can assure you these things operate for thousands of hours... I'm sure getting back to basics can save that much to everyone of us..

My two cents too.

Steve is that you?[:-]

You can use the 3M DP460 ....DP420 same characteristics as the EROPOXY...

if you need strainers i got about 700 left or so.
what is there to prototype? the bottle is standard.
festo is done
you just need to make some nipples..

Marc
Have you tried Legris fittings they are also fairly good [link=http://www.legris-pneumatics.com/webcat/quick-f1.asp]click here[/link]

Does anyone know that the Festo brand products are actually made by a company named Pisco from Japan...check'm out they have an even wider range of products.

Lavi. Don't let Mr Gladwin hear about your idea to go back to basics. He is currently tearing shreds out of people on the JMA forum and suggesting that it should be a rule in the Uk for jets to have redundancy on pretty much everything, if he had his way I think we'd all have to use weatronics. I think he must have shares or sponsorship LOL

Duncan

That's DG's favorite this week, last week it was Spektrum, next week it will be something else that will be rock solid and absolutly fail proof, he will never run out of adjectives to use for his latest hobby horse.

Mike

Say, Todd, has anyone asked you what you think of brand H servos lately? [8D]

Wing bags (sleeves) are waaaaay overpriced. Come on! $70 to $120 for wing bags! Some go as high as $400 for a jet! Ridiculous! The material is not expensive, and anyone can sew those together. They should not cost more than $40 to cover a whole jet ... and be custom made. Geeze, my girlfriend can pump almost a dozen of those sets out in an hour on a sewing machine.

Then, there is a company who charges $9 for an aluminum bellcrank and $17.25 for the exact same carbon fiber strips (two strips .007, 1/2 x 72) I can buy from Dave Brown for just $13.00

True, once the item is labeled or sold as an accessory for a jet, the price doubles or triples ... worse yet, are the jet guys who just pay it without even asking what the price is. Classic tale of more money than brains?

I don't need no stinkin' UAT !!

Sandor not sure why you seem to like to make negative comments on most of my threads, although appreciate the offer of 'strainers' - I assume you mean the filter assembly, is that complete with Saran bag as well?
Actually regardless of whats been done, there are often ways to change ideas to make them better, not always but sometimes.
Point of my thoughts, and they are only thoughts at this stage is to bin that 'standard' bottle, case of a square peg in a round hole ;-)

marcs