Expercraft?

[airguy]

I have my builders log backed up, of course - but the Expercraft site appears to have been down for about a week now. Anybody have any insight into this?

[painless]

I get a message that it will be down until Januarary 15th

[painless]

Now I?m getting a message that the expercraft site is suspended indefinitely. Inquiries are to be sent to rob@riggen.org.

Sent a message this morning, no response yet.


Ho boy......

[airguy]

Yup, looks like Tango Uniform, and best of luck.

[airguy]

This morning on the Expercraft site - RIP Expercraft.

"In November of 2007 I launched ExperCraft to the public. It started out as a completely free service and evolved into a voluntary pay system for what proved to be a very useful tool for many builders and restorers of aircraft.

My aspirations were to generate revenue by advertising relevant products to builders who need them, while providing a tool to make building and tracking your aircraft project easier and more enjoyable and automatically publishing an easy to share web site.

While the product did help the builders and inspectors, I found it very difficult to break into the experimental aircraft advertising market due to a variety of factors mostly around potential advertisers having small budgets, dedicating the ad dollars to shows, glossy magazine publications or other long entrenched advertising efforts.

I had to keep my day job, so to speak.

With the "pay what you want" system, ExperCraft operated at nearly break even for many years covering most of the operating expenses, with me covering the difference. To my dissapointment, I could not afford to invest in further development, as was my original plan. Eventually the software fell too many versions behind to be easily updated.

A recent update broke the system, though no data has been lost.

I'm sorry to you and the experimental aviation community that I have not been able to develop this tool to make it the success I had envisioned and that now it is suspended.

I will work to provide data dumps for interested users. I'll respond to email messages individually.

Also, I intend to bring the system back up, but in a better state in the near future. With my current financial state and work commitments, I cannot make any promises on delivery dates.

My more than 11 years experience with ExperCraft, including being a speaker at Oshkosh, attending dozens of aviation expositions and fly ins (with EAA, AOPA and many other groups) and meeting dozens if not hundreds of people from all over the USA and the world who were aircraft builders and expercraft users has been a rewarding and enriching aspect of my life.

Thank you for being an active member of the experimental aircraft community and keep going on your projects. The most important thing for you and the whole industry is that you make your aircraft fly. Finish it and fly it. Be safe and have fun.

Sincerely,

Rob

Please direct questions and inquiries to rob at riggen dot org"

[odens_14]

I just sent an email to rob to be part of the data dump so we'll see. It's a bummer the site is no more but I'm glad if appears he's giving users the ability to retrieve their data. I'm not sure if I'll ever need it but better safe than sorry so to speak.

[rzbill]

Rats.

All the images I have posted here in the last 14 years are now toast.
I have the PDF backup of my Expercraft entries and of course all the images are filed on my home computer but rebuilding for fixing VAF image links is not something I have time to do. At least not until I retire.

Ah well. I knew the risks. The site was very useful during its life. Thanks Rob.

[Tommy123]

Never trust someone else's computer or your own, back it up onto a stand alone drive.

[JesseS]

There are archived versions of this site available, containing at least some data. The most recent one is here:

https://web.archive.org/web/20181123...xpercraft.com/

[rzbill]

Originally Posted by Tommy123

Never trust someone else's computer or your own, back it up onto a stand alone drive.

Your suggestion for hosting images to post here on VAF is........?