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Man, I hope Larry is still speaking to me after this thread...
I disagree again. I would never use a shop that has done lots of work for the current owner to do a prebuy. Here is why.
Over the course of owning an airplane, if you take it to the same shop repeatedly, you naturally develop a relationship with the shop, hopefully one of mutual affection (or you would take it elsewhere). Now, look at it from the point of view of the mechanic. You are doing an inspection of an airplane. On the one hand, you have the owner that you have known, perhaps for years, who has paid you a lot of money, and you know to be an OK guy, maybe you know his wife, his kids, and you know how badly he needs to sell his airplane. On the other hand, you have this guy you have never heard of who comes from out of state, that you are doing the inspection for. You will probably never see this guy again.
I agree with Larry that almost all shops, any that are reputable anyway, will report the same airworthiness items to you. (The spar is cracked, the case is cracked, etc.). But there are a WHOLE lot of judgement call items that he can make a point of telling you about or not. And what I am saying is that mechanics are human, and by using the same shop the owner has a relationship with, you place the mechanic in a conflict of interest situation, and it does not work in your favor. For example, if the mechanic tells you the baffling looks sad, and is in need of replacement, later the owner is angrily saying "Hey, you didn't tell me I needed to replace the baffling last year, you told me it was 'OK for now', so why are you telling this guy it's bad? Jeez, you're killing me here..." Rather than tell you about it, the mechanic just skips it. It is "good enough", after all. Then you buy the airplane, and your new mechanic back home says "Hey, this baffling shot, we've got to replace it." And you wonder why you didn't hear about it in your prebuy...
If the shop has worked on the airplane once, a year ago, and that's it, I wouldn't worry about it, I would use them. But if there is a regular relationship between the shop and the owner, I would find another shop. For a purchase this expensive, I want a guy who works for me, and doesn't have worries about pissing off the curent owner in the back of his mind, even subconsciously.
By the way, the last mechanic I used made it a policy to never do prebuys for airplanes owned by their customers, for this same reason.
Kevin
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