Socata - the most expensive cheap screw ever?

this is America with metric items

I don’t understand why have a swipe at America? That is some unusual screw which has a tiny hexagon for a purpose. They are sometimes found in items like disk drives (which I frequently dismantle, keeping all the screws) which contain a large number of screws of all sizes and this is probably done to enable the line operator to use the same screwdriver bit throughout, and it goes into something soft (plastics?) so no high torque is required.

America doesn’t go for metric much; in aviation they have a system of imperial fasteners (the MS AN etc ranges) which is vastly better value for money than the European metric fastener “max €€€ extraction” system which strives for minimum standardisation and maximum customer capture in the downstream spare parts business. We did that e.g. here.

Even Airbus were forced to abandon metric fittings, and are built with American standard parts

As Silvaire shows, “metric” parts are easy enough to get, and cheaply. Ebay is full of high quality chinese made stainless steel (even 316) screws. But here Socata have used their superior engineering skills to specify a screw with a 100 degree angle which is a lot harder to get, especially if you also need a sharp lip on the head, to match the countersink already present in Socata airframes. And their superior accountancy skills have elevated the price to unreasonably high levels – see the posts further back in this thread showing the much lower cost of a fully custom made replica, even in quantities orders of magnitude smaller than Socata buy these at.

Back to the screw under original discussion, Socata recently reduced the price of these screws but have just jacked them up again. Maybe the old man in a shed (the typical Socata supplier profile; they use obscure small local firms) who made the old ones passed away and they had to use another man in a more expensive shed. Clearly they aren’t reading EuroGA because they could have gone to that company I posted a while ago and sold them at half the old price and still made a huge profit And that’s the easy option; if you are willing to go to China and buy say 100k you can get any screw custom made, for peanuts. I’ve recently bought 300k beautifully made little springs… at about 1/10 of the UK price, and on past experience of jointly running a business in France many years ago, at about 1/20 of the French price.

And if TB owners got together and did a bulk purchase, one could have easily got through a batch of 10k+ of these. But getting pilots to work together is near-impossible and to finish it off nicely there would be no EASA-1 or 8130-3 form with these, which means that the majority of owners would be scared of using them, or more precisely, in Europe, their maintenance company would not use them. I have seen this first-hand; I have a little stock of Socata parts, no paperwork, I carefully tell people there is no paperwork, they order some, and their maint company refuses to touch them. This (and the equivalent in the US) cuts no mustard when money is to be made

Brexit does not help as well in case of United Queendom

I totally fail to understand where brexit comes into this. Germany is probably the last place to buy screws from the UK

The TB aircraft should have been made wholly with American parts. It already uses all-American parts in and around the engine (basically everything firewall-forward, except the wonderful €€€-generating ISO thread hoses), all-American avionics, and largely-American electrical parts. In fact the non-American electrical parts are another regular source of hassle.

Not sure if I posted this before but this is a drawing done by one UK firm I considered for making these screws

m4x14csk_pdf