Good experience
The shop is run by Michael McIntosh and you can't find it from here no matter where "here" is. I drove down there from Fayetteville, Arkansas using Map Quest information which is not current. Now, I'm not sure how many of you have been to northwest Arkansas but it is awesomely beautiful wilderness country. It was almost worth the gyro problem to get to experience the countryside. The name of the company is Rudy Aircraft Instruments, Inc. at 4711 Old Bowman Road, Rudy Arkansas 72952, Phone 479-474-8759. Mike and his wife move there from Houston and started the business in 1987. It seems that Rudy, population 72, has a new bridge that Map Quest doesn't know about. I stopped at the post office in Rudy (yes they have a nice one in fact) to get directions.
When I arrived I found a nice but not pretentious facility and I dealt directly with Mike to get the overhaul accomplished. He told me that the lubricant compound that the manufacturer used to work with the vaccum driven instruments had separated in the 6 years from manufacture to my first flight and most subjected to this scenario do not last 275 flight hours as mine had. The particals that separated out of the fluid were spread through out the two instruments and ironically are a source of wear in this state. A bearing in the DG was frozen and the rotor shaft was ground to destruction. This is certainly consistent with what I saw and heard in the cockpit. I would not be at all surprised if this "abrasive contamination" contributed to the vacuum pump failure I had shortly before the Gyros began squawling and jerking so bad that they could not be ignored. I reinstalled the overhauled instruments and they flight tested great. I saved over $1,000 dollars from the price quoted for an overhaul of my instruments by the company in Wichita.
Bob Axsom