Nosedragger wrote:Is Stancil still in business? A friend of mine bought a 185 from him days before he got in hot water for selling drug planes for cash.

Mark Pilkington now owns the business with Dan Mathis I believe http://www.skywagons.com

I purchased my 185 from Mark. Super knowledgable on Skywagons, super helpful making the sale happen, and a straight shooter. The plane was exactly what he said it was. Extremely pleased doing business with him.

Barnstormer wrote:I completely feel your pain. I just spent over a year trying to sell my first Stearman. I originally bought it for $65,000 three years ago. Put $30,000 into getting it into cherry mechanical condition - zero squawks, and replaced the wood propellor with a much more efficient 70 year old fixed pitch McCauley at a cost $8,000. I priced it initially at $79,000 and over the period of a year slowly brought the price down and down and down.

[...]

I had it with a broker friend that has been restoring Stearmans for 25 years, he showed it a lot. I then took over the sale myself, reworded the ads and photos, and dropped the price to $59,000 with the wood prop. As before the trade offers continued. This price did open up the overseas market and a group of three German fighter pilots pooled their money and purchased it a week ago. I put the McCauley prop on Barnstormers and sold it separately.

Holy cow. I wish I could have gotten in on that. But, of course, that's kind of the point of the story right. If I could have, it would probably indicate a different market than now and the deal wouldn't have existed.

Glad to hear you finally sold it. Sorry it didn't go better.

Barnstormer pretty much summed it up when he said the market here in America is in the tank. In the recent sale of one of my planes I experienced the same type of senario as he did. Lot's of trade offers, uncountable lowball offers, liars, cheats, guys that had money in their pocket and would 'be there tomorrow with cash'. The worst one's are the habitual 'tirekickers' that call every day or two for weeks on end asking the same questions they just asked the day before. Or the on'e that try to make me feel bad because I hadn't sold it yet and play the game of telling me how bad the market is for sellers, like I didn't know that already! They are hoping I will dropped the price 50-75% because can buy it right NOW for what they precieve as a fair price. Also, had the continual call from brokers wanting to sell it because they already had a buyer. Of course they could get more than my asking price so after their commision I would be better off using them than selling on my own.

Yes, I had a bad past experience selling this last plane. I did end up selling it for almost exacly what I paid for it. But as Barnstormer had done, I had invested lots of money in upgrades and fixing things that I did not recoup my expenditure on in the sale. Had to realize I got to fly it on floats obtaining my float rating and had lots of fun with it but it was time for it to go to a new owner since I no longer had the time to enjoy it.

In the end you might be better off taking a slight lose in the sale of your Luscombe so you can get that Bearhawk in your livery once and for all.