Captain Avgas
Well Known Member
I spent 10 grand (actually more) renovating my garage into an airplane shop. The financial math on the garage reno was done with option B where many of the little things like the extra switch cover didn't get added in.
Does that count as part of the airplane cost?
This is an easy question to answer. If the expenditure on the garage has not added anything to the capital value of the property in terms of resale value then it’s an aircraft building cost. It’s that simple.
Actually your interesting post jogged my memory. I remembered installing many banks of fluorescent lighting in my garage to bring the lux level up to a useable luminosity for my aircraft build (poor lighting is one of the most common reasons for substandard workmanship). And then later on I added a temporary garage annex so that I could trial fit the wings at home. There are untold ways to haemorrhage money during the build of an aircraft...much of it does not appear in any budget.
I tried to build as economically as I could. No one wants to spend more money than they have to. But as the build progressed I found myself throwing more money at it just to get it finished. The best way to really waste a lot of money on an aircraft build is to quit before it’s finished. And the further you are into the build, the truer that becomes....bailing out of a 90% built plane will be financially disasterous. So in the end I gave up on trying to save small amounts of money (particularly on freight costs) and aimed at getting the job completed at any cost. I suspect this would be true of many other builders as well. They start off being very careful and frugal and eventually just end up throwing money at the project to get it finished before they run out of perseverance.
This thread has thrown up some very interesting comments and shows a real maturity over many past threads on building costs. In the past threads on building costs have eventually tended to descend into a farcical competition as to who had built the cheapest RV in history. You always got the good soul who had built an RV4 back in the 1980s for $30k. It had a time expired O-320, timber prop, second hand steam gauges....and was unpainted.
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