[TG] [TG11] faulty rotater dial on E7D

[eianm]

After having been a dedicated Ray supporter for many years and with ALL instrumentation and auto pilot on my boat Raymarine, I was really disappointed after contacting Raymarine Australia to be told my 4 year old E7D could not be repaired by them, instead I was referred to an authorised local repairer. Contacted him and was told to replace my faulty rotater dial would cost around $400! This is crazy- I have spent my life in manufacturing and know the raw cost of this part will be under $20 ( maybe up to $50 at trade) .
It looks to me that the repair time would be probably less than 30 minutes for someone who hadn't don't the job before, quicker for someone experienced in this repair. Where can I buy this part so I can do the repair myself please as you no longer support my product and your authorised repairer wants to rip off Ray customers.

[Tom - Raymarine - Moderator]

Hello eianm,

My apologies, I see that your post hasn't received a reply as yet.

You raise several points here which I should address.

We do refer post-warranty service work to one of our technical service dealers who specialises in this work as a matter of resources, but we are confident that in general they offer an equivalent price and level of service to what we would offer had the repair been done in-house, and we do all we can to support them in order to try to make sure this is the case.

What part is it specifically that is the problem in your e7D? We have a Unicontroller spare (part R70226, currently AU$60.5 RRP, available under that part number through any Raymarine dealer, in stock and easy to replace), but generally that's not the part that is at fault. Normally controller issues are actually the PCB, though, which we expect to take 1-2 hours (pre-disassembly test and diagnosis, replacement, re-test). As a time-and-materials repair this would break down as, very roughly:
PCB: AU$125
Seal kit: AU$50
Labour: AU$100 - 200
Return courier: AU$20
This total comes pretty close to that which you've been quoted by our nominated service partner, and is I assume the repair which they've quoted you for rather than the simple Unicontroller mechanical part. By all means check with them, and if indeed they've quoted approx. AUD400 to replace the Unicontroller mechanical part only, please let me know.

By the way, Raymarine service centres are moving away from time-and-materials repairs towards fixed-price repairs in the interest of efficiency and speed in repair turnaround time (previously all repairs were delayed considerably by the to-and-fro quote-and-approval process). The fixed-price repair on e7D is actually higher than you've been quoted. For a PCB replacement, I think that the price you've been quoted is correct and reasonable based on my breakdown above.

I'm sure you're well aware with your background, but for anyone else reading this post I will just add a reminder that the price of a spare part is not simply the sum of its materials but includes things like:

• engineering design time (which is a small proportion of a high-volume part but an increasing large factor as part volume decreases, as in relatively niche marine electronics)
• non-material manufacturing costs (labour etc.)
• freight, warehousing and logistics costs (duties, taxes and so on)
• a proportion of the overheads of the rest of the business (including technical support, for example)
• a profit margin (we are a business after all, and wouldn't be here to offer the part if we didn't turn a profit)
  

Regards,
Tom