Ouch, My Poor Wallet

[Bill Greenwood]

Man aviation is fun, but it sure is not free.
I fly a 1988 Beech B 36 Bonanza, very good plane, but it can be expensive to repair everything.
I have been having trouble with my King KFC 150 autopilot. It engages and works fine, but when I disengage it the pitch servo doesn't want to release, so that it tries to hold the pitch attitude level, and this makes it hard to descend. Shaking the yoke forward and back once will break the hold and you are back to normal.
So I called my expert avionics man, Bob Caswell, and he was very familiar with the problem which is the servo clutch.
The bad news is the price of a rebuilt one is $2500 plus 4 hours labor.
OUCH, and just when I thought the plane was doing pretty well.
The other bad news is that King was only required to support the autopilot for 7 years so parts may be hard to find.
I do use the autopilot, it is a safety item if you are flying in IMC and I use it on long legs like going to Oshkosh and back to let me relax in cruise and look at the chart or just sightsee.
So guess I'll do what is necessary to keep it working.
But I should be fine, after all I saved so much money at Airventure since they lowered the price of bottle water by a dollar. Let's see, 2 bottles a day for 5 days, so 10 total and spent $20 instead of $30, that is quite a saving. Now to find the other $2490.