Posted on 07/17/2018 10:18:01 AM PDT by davikkm
No. They are trying to tell us it cost that much.
Wake up Chuck Grassley...
They have come a long way since the $600 hammer.
Sen. Grassley is not on Defense committees.
To all the dimwits on this thread or who write these idiotic stories - the mold is the cost. Stainless steel plastic or ceramic molds can be 100k or much more depending on size and complexity.
Plastic parts are cheap because the make millions of parts with a single mold. But if you only need a few, each part will cost thousands.
Toilet seats aside, regarding otherwise constitutionally justified government spending, I understand that no government department wants to spend less than what was allocated to it in a given year and risk a budget cut the following year.
In other words, bureaucrats probably paid more than what toilet seats were worth out of desperation to protect annual budget.
In other words, patriots need to elect a new, Trump-supporting, “power of the purse” (1.7.1) House of Representatives in midterm elections to better manage / protect taxpayer dollars.
Insights welcome.
Plastic parts are cheap because the make millions of parts with a single mold. But if you only need a few, each part will cost thousands.
I actually do know this. And I think a lot of other FReepers do to. It's just fun to pile on with jokes and poke fun.
As you say, in manufacturing, tooling, dies, molds, equipment is the big investment. The raw materials, especially commodities, can be pretty cheap. But if you buy a $100K mold and $25K worth of custom racks and tooling for 10 parts, that is going to cost quite a bit. ON THE OTHER HAND, if you were to update the plane and re-build the compartment you might spend the same amount of money on more than a few toilet seats. And that is more likely the rub for those in the know.
Sounds about right for Barbra Streisand.
Single use, sterilized, etc.
Sprinkled with rose pedals.
no doubt the 3-d printing co is also including something else 3-d printed in the package out the back door
$500 hammers, $10K seat covers, all that stuff is cover for funding missions/projects that either have no budget because ‘they don’t exist’ or where the budget has been cut but the mission must go on
Full mil spec nuclear hardened toilet seats with heads up display and vitals monitoring sensors, no doubt.
'They're' so FOS their eyes are brown and their breath stinks. It's no wonder they need $10,000 toilet seats.
Budgets for things are hidden a whole number of ways, and this is one of them.
No, but any body shop in town, or dozens of plastic manufacturing shops could fabricate that out of top quality materials for a few hundred bucks.
And if the Air Force can’t fabricate a simple part like that, they need to fold their tents and go home.
“To all the dimwits on this thread or who write these idiotic stories - the mold is the cost. Stainless steel plastic or ceramic molds can be 100k or much more depending on size and complexity.”
Bullcrap. That part could easily be made by almost any automotive upholstery shop for peanuts, and it would be just as good.
It’s probably one of the ways they fund black projects
Not to mention the overhead cost of simply dealing with the US government. Bidding the job, negotiating, producing a prototype, having the prototype tested by a NIST-certified independent analysis group, meeting the original part specs for performance (yes, performance), all the while being subject to government audit and review.
It’s a wonder we get anything built.
This is pure reporting malpractice. No one pays $10,000 for a “toilet seat.” The item is a small bulkhead adjacent to the crapper. During a lot of 14-hour flights, someone needs to use the can. Everyone needs the pisser. In the P-3 we had a stand-up pisser and a toilet bucket. Not very glamorous. I believe the P-8 has the same.
*** “Not to mention the overhead cost of simply dealing with the US government. Bidding the job, negotiating, producing a prototype, having the prototype tested by a NIST-certified independent analysis group, meeting the original part specs for performance (yes, performance), all the while being subject to government audit and review. It’s a wonder we get anything built.” ***
Bump Ditto!
I have a lot of experience in dealing with Govt Contracts... You left out SLOW PAY ... Vendor carries the Note (100%) until the Contract is Satisfied to All of the Bureaucrats Satisfaction and those faces and names may have changed 3 times from the beginning.
The Process is Stupid Unfair and my $ is on “The supplier of the $10,000 Cover Lost $”
If the tooling was destroyed and had to be rebuilt, it might. Years ago, when the anti-defense left made the cost of spare parts a regular hit piece against the Reagan defense budget, that was a recurring issue. It gets very expensive to keep very old aircraft in the air. The production run on a plane had ended. The proposed replacement fell into the black hole of perpetual RD&D. The Democrats stalled endlessly on ever putting anything new into production. The fleet got older and older. Stocks of spare parts were depleted. Then we'd start to cannibalize planes. But eventually, a new part had to be manufactured.
A toilet seat cover (unlike any number of other parts that sometimes came into controversy) shouldn't require anything sophisticated, but if one has to retool to produce one or three or five parts, it still gets expensive. I don't know how 3-D printing changes the equation.
“Their trying to tell us that piece of moulded plastic cist $10,000?”
No, the engineers who had to redesign and recertify it for flight use, those guys cost 10k and it is cheap.
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