Tom Martin
Well Known Member
I have been making great progress with the new RV14, the building part is done, the hours are flown off, I have the final flight permits with the restrictions removed. The only issue I am having is with the Garmin Servos. A month ago when I was putting things together I tried the autopilot and got hardware and power supply errors for the pitch servo. Both pitch and roll servos are the same but I call one pitch and roll for obvious reasons.
Turns out Garmin had a bad batch of servos and did not take the time to track down serial numbers and get back to customers. I will give them the benefit of the doubt, maybe the problems were not in a particular batch of servos but intermittent failures. Stein Air did the panel and they have been very helpful with information. Garmin on the other hand refused to send a new servo directly to me. As I live in Canada it had to go directly to a Garmin dealer. Three weeks later I got the servo today at noon. I rushed to the airplane and installed it only to now find the same error message at the roll servo. Stein is going to send a servo directly to me as I just do not want to wait for weeks to get one from Garmin. Hopefully Garmin will reimburse Stein for the overnight shipping. As always, Stein and company are very helpful. This stuff is expensive, and mistakes happen, but it is how mistakes are handled that gives me comfort in a company. Not shipping a part directly to a customer is an indication of inflexibility in dealing with a customer problem.
Turns out Garmin had a bad batch of servos and did not take the time to track down serial numbers and get back to customers. I will give them the benefit of the doubt, maybe the problems were not in a particular batch of servos but intermittent failures. Stein Air did the panel and they have been very helpful with information. Garmin on the other hand refused to send a new servo directly to me. As I live in Canada it had to go directly to a Garmin dealer. Three weeks later I got the servo today at noon. I rushed to the airplane and installed it only to now find the same error message at the roll servo. Stein is going to send a servo directly to me as I just do not want to wait for weeks to get one from Garmin. Hopefully Garmin will reimburse Stein for the overnight shipping. As always, Stein and company are very helpful. This stuff is expensive, and mistakes happen, but it is how mistakes are handled that gives me comfort in a company. Not shipping a part directly to a customer is an indication of inflexibility in dealing with a customer problem.
Last edited: