Posted on 07/17/2018 10:18:01 AM PDT by davikkm
“Bullcrap. That part could easily be made by almost any automotive upholstery shop for peanuts, and it would be just as good.”
And who is going to do the paperwork that certifies it to fly? Oh you don’t know about that paperwork do you? Then stop talking about what you don’t understand.
“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”
I will tell you because I have done work on the C-5 semi-recently and I know the state of those design drawings. (I can tell you know a lot of this but I am speaking to the thread at large.
They have to pull it from ancient paper drawings.
Someone has to turn those into a 3D model.
Someone has to check that model. (peer review)
They have to make a prototype.
They have to fully test that prototype to be sure remaking it with modern materials and techniques will not cause it to be brittle or vibrate badly or any number of things.
They have to do a stack of paper work so the military knows they are getting workmanship that they contractually require including things like flame resistance.
They have to archive and version control all the new drawings and everything else.
They aren’t charging 10k for a part. They are paying 10k for the time and labor of a lot of professionals.
All this is REQUIRED by the military. Contractors don’t just make this stuff up. Other countries just have joe-shmo down the street slap stuff in their planes and guess what, those planes randomly fall out of the sky.
“The Process is Stupid Unfair and my $ is on “The supplier of the $10,000 Cover Lost $””
I would bet a fat stack you are right.
Good point! I bet you’re right on the supplier losing $.
Doesn’t matter.
The senator previously nailed the Air Force on hugely expensive toilet seats they wanted to buy.
I'm working from ancient memory, but my favorite example used to be the cost for a wheel strut for an aircraft for which production had been discontinued 20 years earlier. This became a notorious red herring for the Ted Kennedy professional liar types, but no matter how many times you explained it to reporters, they kept reporting the lie. The reality was that the replacement aircraft was supposed to have gone into production years before. Naturally, in the post-Vietnam and Jimmy Carter era, anti-defense liberals found endless reasons for never launching the new plane. Then Reagan came along. Most of the great procurement wars of that era were over systems that should have been fielded much earlier.
Modernization has been taking a beating in recent years due to sequestration and the cost of active wars in the Middle East. There's a considerable backlog. Spare parts is the least of it.
Tough to take this seriously when this nonsense is spouted. The national GDP is $17T. The Pentagon is not worth half of our national output.
I get to go home to Michigan every year and spend a lot of money at Menard's remodeling my retirement home. I am amazed they still use that exact same jingle in their stores as when I first entered a Menard's in 1985. It must drive their employees crazy but I do love Menard's.
I imagine some of that money went to intelligence community black ops.
B-52s and KC-135s have a single can in which to pee and poop. First one to use it has to empty it after the mission so many crew members fly in pain so they don’t have to empty the can. After the first poor sap goes then everybody else lets her rip.
I was thinking an old stump, chainsaw, whittling knife and a quart of shellac - but your idea is better. I fixed my busted up plastic bumper like new. I bet youtube has how to repair a Galaxy seat cover.
When I saw the headline, I was thinking my grandmother could knit one - but I was thinking of the cover for the seat cover.
How did you safely get into my house to take that picture? Did you throw in some cat treats before you came in?
Does anybody else remember the flap over the $600 replacement toilet seats for P-3 aircraft? I was still on ACDU in the P-3 community at the time and frankly we thought nothing of it. The aircraft were last built almost 20 years before the toilet seat issue came up. Because spare toilet seats were not an authorized spare (or all the spares had been consumed) it was necessary to find a contractor to make them one off. That’s why they cost so much, and that’s likely the same issue here.
First rational answer i've seen in this thread. This "Toilet Seat Cover" kerfuffle appeared years ago with the same sort of histrionics. Someone finally posted a picture of the item in question, and it wasn't what people normally think of as a toilet seat cover. It was this large multi-angled monstrosity that enclosed the entire toilet system, and looked as though 10,000 dollars for it was not all that unreasonable.
But exactly like some of the responders on this thread, people then instantly concluded that the items in question were identical to the toilet seats sold in every home store on the planet.
Nothing could be further from the truth. This is the actual part in question:
Well, they’re paying for something other than a toilet seat.
*** “The Pentagon is not worth half of our national output” ***
They don’t call it the “Puzzle Palace” for nothing.
Hillary tapped that resource and disappeared a bunch of $
When Mom and Dad Clinton croak Chelsea Hubble won’t be /isn’t adept or smart enough to keep all of those stolen funds ... But then the Partner Soros kid’s are smart enough.
Follow the $
(Not to mention Congressmen, Senators, EX Presidents etc)
It is all a Giant Scam ... Politicians go in making $65K per year and go out being Multi Millionaires ... gee how did that happen?
The folks that make the Laws are NOT going to kill that Golden Goose ... we have to find another way.
It’s not actually a seat cover as the article leads one to believe. Its a panel that mounts around the toilet and against the bulkhead of the aircraft. It has to fit peculiar bends and angles and is attached with stainless steel screws. Obsolescence is a big thing in the Military right now. Our aircraft, Ships and Heavy Hardware are old and parts that were not suppose to break are failing. But the troops make due. And I would bet that the 10K price isn’t each (probably includes engineering and initial set up fees.
See post #59
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