I met the prospective seller on Thanksgiving to take a look at the plane for the first time. I was near his general area visiting relatives so he flew over to meet me.
We had talked several times by phone, exchanged e-mails and faxes and came to an agreeable price if everything was as stated.
The plane flew good and I went back over the normal questions. I clearly remember his response that day as "no" when the subject of damage history came up. I was so clear about this because there just so happened to be a guy who supposedly had an A&P certification hanging around the airport that day. Something looked slightly quirky about the plane to him and he asked the seller about damage history. After the seller left he told me he still felt like the plane had some damage history. I didn't see anything major to unnerve me and figured I'd let someone more knowledgeable than myself take a look at it in detail and make that determination. I was generally confident enough that day to give him a deposit for $500. I wrote on the check "Subject to a satisfactory prebuy inspection".
After much planning, scheduling and rescheduling, we finally got four grown folks schedules (me, the seller, my guy doing the prebuy and my friend in the V tail S model Bonanza who was good enough to haul us around)together one Saturday about a week and a half later to get the prebuy done. Boy that Bonanza was sweet, but that is another story.
Let's cut to the chase. At the prebuy, after removing the inspection panels under the wing, with the aid of a flashlight and mirror, we noticed that some of the wing spars on each side were OD green rather than bare metal.
My guy says that all of them should have been bare metal and that indicates to him that some have apparently been replaced at some time or another. Is this assumption true?
He carefully examined the skin surrounding the suspected area and deemed the repair to have been well done. No ripples or irregularities.
Compressions were good (mid 70's) and other than a few minor oil leaks of an unknown source, everything else checked out OK. But, with only 3360 TTAF and 260 SMOH I kind of expected everything to be OK.
The guy doing my inspection was none to impressed with the Terra digital radio stack that the owner was so proud of. He made me aware that Terra is now defunct and that although everything is working fine now and the plane's IFR certification is current, I may have trouble getting someone to work on them if any problems pop up. The owner said a company in Texas had bought all the rights and patents to Terra and is servicing the later model digital Terra stuff like found in this plane.
When we finally got around to inspecting the logs, we found an disturbing entry from 1980. A single line entry that merely said "plane rebuilt". When I asked the seller about this he said he had never noticed it before. I'm green and new to the world of plane buying but, it seems to me to much emphasis has been placed upon a through examination of log books that this would have been overlooked by the seller.
My delima is this. My conscience tells me that if I was going to call off the whole deal or renegotiate the price, I should have done it that day or made the seller aware that there was a problem. Instead, all I could think of was getting my hands on the FAA CD to look at the 337's to determine just exactly what had been done and to determine if it was significant enough to raise an issue with it.
As soon as I got home I ordered the CD. It's been about 2.5 weeks now and it hasn't come back yet. The only reason I haven't been pushed to close the deal by now is due to 2 old liens filed with the FAA back in 1980. Once the loans were paid off, the terminations were never filed and they are creating clouds on the title that my bank wants cleared up before the loan is closed.
All in all, I think the plane is a good plane. The guy who did the inspection for me thinks it is a good plane. He also thinks that with a damage history now known and avionics that will be more worthless with each passing year due to a now defunct company, the agreed price of 25K is to much even with a low time IFR cert. plane. I just don't know.
If I should decide to back out, should I leave the $500 lying on the table since I didn't make issue with this several weeks ago at the prebuy or am I justified in asking for my money back since not everthing is as it was portrayed? Has to much time passed? What is fair?
If it was up to me, I would like to renegoiate the price lower and move forward. But, I bet he won't feel the same way and that's why I'm asking your opinion.
