Buying a used home-built?

Jay Honeck asks;

What's the consensus on this issue? Is this a valid fear,.....

Sure, the fear is valid, because there's no oversight of the
manufacturing - as has been pointed out, the standard deviation of
quality can be a lot larger than for spam-cans. However.....

.....or -- as some
have told me -- does the workmanship on the average home-built meet or
exceed that of the average Spam Can?

This is also true - the AVERAGE homebuilt is better than the AVERAGE
spam can. The standard deviation of quality is higher, too, as
mentioned above, so there will be some homebuilts that are a lot
crappier than spam cans, but most will be better.

That being said, having a person knowledgable in the particular aircraft
you're looking at examine the plane for you will tell you which end of
the spectrum you're on.

For composite aircraft, there are a few things that may be harder to
determine than with metal aircraft. For those, flight hours will be a
large determining factor. Even though I fly a composite aircraft, and
am very familiar with the technology, I wouldn't purchase a composite
homebuilt that had less than a hundred or so hours on it, and had
documentation (or at least attestations) that it had been tested to the
design limits. But if the plane in question has been flying for 300
hours, you can be pretty sure that the structure is sound, even without
looking at it.

Glasairs are VERY nice planes.... :-).

--
Marc J. Zeitlin
http://marc.zeitlin.home.comcast.net/
http://www.cozybuilders.org/
Copyright (c) 2004