My tale of whoa
A friend just sent me this thread on Laser ignitions and feel I must add my thoughts also.
I was returning from Florida and SnF on Sunday. I landed (which is another story in and of it self!) at CPC (Columbus County, NC ...really cheap fuel!) and when I did my run up prior to departure I had a dead left mag. Mind you, ATC had me about 20 mi. off shore of FL and GA coasts an hour before this happened. This wasn't a burble or just a slight loss of rpm, this was outright failure. To make a long story short, an APIA came out and pulled the mag thinking the points had just closed up on it. To our surprise, when the cap came off, the wire from the coil(?) that was connected to the circuit board burned off the board and the whole board looked semi charred. Tons of carbon dust inside also.
I stayed overnight and started to call around to find a replacement. Ha-ha, the best I could find was Ramaircraft that said they could get one to me in three weeks!.
I called Unison's piston engine help line and just got recordings. I finally just kept calling numbers there until I got a live person. This went on through several people and finally got connected to "Steve" at Snf! I pleaded my case to him and he asked to call me back in a few minutes. Surprise, surprise, he actually did call me back with the news that there was a mag in the Rockford IL. warehouse and they would overnight it to me. I thought, great. I'll be able to get home on Tuesday.....not!. It seems that UPS has different ideas as to what constitutes overnight when shipping to Whiteville, NC. Red tag stuff doesn't have to arrive by 10:00am. Nooooooo, it can come anytime of the day, that being 4:30pm on Tuesday. Fortunately the people who manage the airport for the county (Phil & Mary) and a local APIA, Toby, were so gracious and understanding. They made arragements at the hotel and drove me around on mutiple occasions all with a smile. There was a lot more to the story but for the sake of brevity all I will say is that I finally got out of NC at 8:00am this morning and home by 10:45 (good tailwind at Norfolk!)
I am now trying to decide how to handle this. I had to pay $600. for the mag but Unison picked up the shipping. My engine only had 200 hrs on it and from the sound of others complaints, this is likely to happen again in another 200 or so hours. I am going to try to get Unison to pickup the cost on the mag (wish me luck, yeah right!) and incidentals. Even if they do, I too, think I am going to chuck this whole system and go with regular Slicks sans the laser system. How can you travel anywhere with reliability as crappy as this? Anyone want to buy a Laser system cheap?
Jody
RV8- IO360A1B6