Seafire LF Mk.III RX168

I think it would have to be cheaper. Using house prices as a guide for inflation is full of pitfalls. With a mass production line and wider availability of all materials needed, it must work out cheaper. 🙂

How much!

Well £5000 got your name or the name of your organisation on the side of a Spitfire via a Spitfire fund.

This was probably a ’round’ number and it is thought that the actual cost was a bit more than this.

‘Embodiment Loan’ items, that is items given by the Government were not included in the price. What they constituted, I am not sure, but I think guns and radio were such items.

There is probably a chart of relative inflation and value in say just pre-war to today. Using the price of a detached house as a comparator I think a typical four bedroom house pre-war in the London suburbs would be about £1500. Let us say that is now £450,000 a factor of x300. Let us assume the real price of a Spitfire in 1940 was say £6,500. Factoring in x300 – that is £1,950,000.

Well damn me – how close to £2m do you want to get? 🙂

…and that is built with the full suite of jigs. Built as prototypes, more similar to todays build, factor in another multiplier

Anybody care to improve/refine on the numbers?

Mark

If I sit and look at a freshly restored Spitfire, unemotionally in 2004, as an engineer and project manager in a parallel industry, I see £2m of engineering at sensible labour rates and a profit margin commensurate with the risk.

Just out of idle curiosity, how much did it cost to produce a Spitfire in WW2 by today’s values? Even with the economies of scale I suspect it must still have been relatively expensive?

Regards,

Paul

Sure Mark V, that’s kind of what I was trying to put across.

I think the bit you were leaving out is (relatively) cheap or volunteer labour as well?

No not really, although labour in this sector is comparitivley (unfairly so)cheap. I am reffering to an all professional re-build under the appropriate CAA authority but with the project owner managing the process but not actually ‘hands on’. This would be in contrast to say, shipping in the unrestored airframe/parts to a restoration shop and then waiting for the phone call to collect the finished aircraft!

If I wanted to be ****ing cencored, I’d ****ing ask for it. And by a ****ing machine! Who’s fooled by a row of ****ing asterisks? D1ck is a name, fule!

I have tried aproaching the webmaster regarding the ridiculous situation where we are barred from writing the name used by a good many people involved in the aircraft preservation world, Mr Melton included. Obviously without common sense being introduced 😡

Sure Mark V, that’s kind of what I was trying to put across.

I think the bit you were leaving out is (relatively) cheap or volunteer labour as well?

1970s Italian cars. Indeed, but bella bella!

Cheers

If I sit and look at a freshly restored Spitfire, unemotionally in 2004, as an engineer and project manager in a parallel industry, I see £2m of engineering at sensible labour rates and a profit margin commensurate with the risk.

James – my understanding of what M12 was saying is that it ‘should’ cost £2m if the job was being done commercially in a parallel engineering industry. In reality it does not cost (in £££s) anything like this (less than half) and the complete, test flown and permitted aircraft will still be worth a little more than the expenditure it took to get to that stage. The hidden factor (and this may be what M12 has factored in) is the time and stress to the instigator of this lengthy process which is a little bit more difficult to put a figure on.

In many respects the Spitfire (and Hurricane) represent good value for money if you are purchasing a flyable aeroplane but embarking on a project may be a different prospect all things considered (sanity included)!

Wow,
Looks like I drove to work in a ghost today then, Yak 11 fan. 1972 MGB. OK, 3rd engine, second interior, 2nd set of cills, but still a fraction of a Supermarine Spitfire’s cost, and a bundle of fun. Ask yourself. Is your car going to be going 32 years from build? Nah.

Cheers

My regular car is barely going 6 years after being built, may be down to my driving however.
Now I do have a 1972 British car made of fibreglass which is running fine, even the chassis is in one piece.
Could be worse though, could be a 70’s Italian car, they barely lasted the year. 😎

If I wanted to be ****ing cencored, I’d ****ing ask for it. And by a ****ing machine! Who’s fooled by a row of ****ing asterisks? D1ck is a name, fule!

Immature Mary Whitehouse types.

Ah, that’s better. Chiz chiz chiz.

Wow,
Looks like I drove to work in a ghost today then, Yak 11 fan. 1972 MGB. OK, 3rd engine, second interior, 2nd set of cills, but still a fraction of a Supermarine Spitfire’s cost, and a bundle of fun. Ask yourself. Is your car going to be going 32 years from build? Nah.

Triumph? Didn’t they make bikes?

Spitfire costs. Mark12’s point, Dave, was that the cost of re-building a Spitfire today is about twice what you could sell it for. If you think about it, the technology is basically the same as car technology. Except the production is essentially handbuilt one off units, with the related expense – no ‘production line’ in real terms (Even **** Melton didn’t have a ‘production line’) so no reduction in costs doe to scale of operation.

Cheers

You can of course be in the right place at the right time and get a Spitfire XIV like TZ138 for a very good price in airworthy condition. There is still a big difference in the world of warbirds between what’s asked and what is actually
agreed on.

Hi David, my summary is very much concerned with the 2004 situation and the realistic advice I would give to a prospective owner. There are of course always exceptions and the vagaries of the exchange rates play their part too. If I were to report on asking prices I would be mentioning figures of up to £1.35m, but as these figures do not, as you correctly say, correlate to the funds actually changing hands I have refrained.

What about the Triumph variety 😀

Nope sorry, all rotted away to nothing now together with any other metal british car of the 60’s and 70’s

Seafire RXi68

Is there any information as to how much of the original Irish Air Corps Seafire exists ? It was at a Technical College in Dublin prior to going to the UK. On each number of occasions when I visited the College it seemed to be cut up more and more and parts destroyed. There were no wings. Is it a question of building a Seafire around the manufacturers plate?
Regards to all
Tony K

You can of course be in the right place at the right time and get a Spitfire XIV like TZ138 for a very good price in airworthy condition. There is still a big difference in the world of warbirds between what’s asked and what is actually
agreed on.

Value of a flyable Spitfire

Well Dave it depends on what you mean by value and which variant of Spitfire you are talking about and how long it is out of restoration. If you are asking how much money do you need in the real world, today, £750,000 would be a bare minimum starting point and you would need to be very lucky and to be in the right place at the right time. £800,000 would be enough to realistically negotiate a purchase but there would be little choice of variant (probably a Mk XVI). £900,000 to £950,000 would bring more choice but if you want the pick of anything on the market then seven figures comes in to play. Of course what is available is not always obvious (no Spitfire section in ‘Exchange & Mart’) and the situation can change by the day.

Market value is influenced by many things certainly perceived rarity is one of them. 15 years ago it would have been extremely difficult to purchase an airworthy Hurricane but today it is possible thanks largely to the efforts of Hawker restorations. In this case availibilty has not significantly affected the price.

Out of curiosity is a completely restored and flying Spitfire really valued at around £2 million Sterling? I have often heard the estimate of US$1 million, which would be less than £1m wouldn’t it? Is that figure grossly out of date?

I was also told in 1993 by Phil Murray, then a pilot with the Alpine Fighter Group, that a flying P40 was worth twice that of a Spitfire as there were so more rare. Today there are many more flying P40’s thanks to companies like Pionair in NZ, so does this make the value of existing P40’s drop as the ‘market’ gets more flooded and less exclusive? Does this happen with all warbirds? Is a Hurricane cheaper to buy now than 15 years ago? Or do they still continue to hold value even though many more are around?

Is profit a dirty word?

Its owned by that strange individual who partially restores airframes, then sells them, thus losing a lot of money. Flying A-services I think.
.

Well actually there is nothing wrong in making money out of Warbirds – is there? It is a business. Successful business equals more Warbirds – anybody complaining about that?

In the case of Spitfire restorations, if you monitor the value of the accumulated parts and process against the spend, the peak profit occurs when the sheet metalwork is complete and large lumps like u/c, engine and prop can be lightly hung in place. It looks like it is 65/75% complete but in reality it is less than 50%. That is the time to sell if profit is the prime motive.

After that point on the graph the spend curve rapidly closes on the value curve moving into severe negative equity through the systems installation phase which is notoriously underestimated. If you have to sell at this point it is deep ‘do do’. Only when the aircraft is in the real last couple of weeks up to flight test does the aircraft acquire its highest value. On occasions this value exceeds the spend. 😉

Many Spitfire projects of the 1970’s/1980’s although grossly underestimated in the time and money needed to completion, were saved financially by the fantastic increase in perceived and actual value. Some may remember my maxim at the time ‘always multiply the number you first thought of by 2.4’. It is only in the 1990’s, where the values have been almost on a plateau, has it become extremely difficult to make the numbers work.

If I sit and look at a freshly restored Spitfire, unemotionally in 2004, as an engineer and project manager in a parallel industry, I see £2m of engineering at sensible labour rates and a profit margin commensurate with the risk.

What we don’t want to see is the 2nd tier ‘Cottage Industry’ sub-contractors, who struggle to make a reasonable living, going out of business.

Mark

PP972 is (was) owned by Flying A Services, not RX168. Flying A would I very much doubt sell anything at a loss it’s run by a gentleman who has had a very good grounding in how to make money out of Warbirds.

Exactly Y11F. People – why make critical remarks about warbird owners/operators. What is the point 🙁

Its owned by that strange indivudual who partially restores airframes, then sells them, thus losing a lot of money. Flying A-services I think.

What an odd bunch.

PP972 is (was) owned by Flying A Services, not RX168. Flying A would I very much doubt sell anything at a loss it’s run by a gentleman who has had a very good grounding in how to make money out of Warbirds.

RE: Seafire LF Mk.III RX168

The wouldn’t be a lot of point in exporting the Seafire as she is currently in hundreds of pieces being sorted out at a rebuilder’s workshop. The fuselage isn’t in one piece which you could describe as looking like a Spitfire/Seafire.