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I hear what both of you are saying. I do struggle with this stuff all the time when it comes to maintenance bills. In a perfect world I would walk into the shop, tell of the problem, and they would fix it correctly the first time. Unfortunately it does not work that way all the time based on the experience I have had over 18+ years of airplane ownership and 7 years of Skymaster ownership. In the real world it becomes a process of elimination starting with the most likely cause and working from there. Inevitably something else gets broken in the process (which I just experienced with a fuel pump wire while trying to repair a leak in the pitot/static system). What I do look for in people is a good faith effort in trying to resolve the problem. Certainly I expect competence but not perfection. It becomes a balance between overall service and occasional frustrations, a balance between working with my home shop versus the time and expense of flying the plane around to different shops. My shop has been in the airplane business for 40+ years and my mechanic has been there since day one. They have been a Cessna repair station forever and I believe they have seen everything there is to see yet sometimes they still get fooled. I do pay for it, a lot, but looking at the big picture, they get most of it right. I wish I could do all this stuff myself but I can't, not even close. So as difficult as it can be, I have to put my faith and money in other people, encourage them to do their best, be a friend, not a jerk, and hope for the best. If I was truly dissatisfied, I would go somewhere else. As for Aero-Mach, they have been always polite on the phone and seem to be doing all they can to fix my signal conditioner. As for the cost, I will pay their bill knowing it was still less than getting a new one from Cessna and chalk it up as another chunk of money to owning an airplane. When the day comes that I don't want to pay anymore, I won't, and the airplane will be somewhere else. This forum is a great way to hopefully take a piece of that cost and put it back in our wallets (and use it for 100LL instead). It's all good!
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