Please keep this to yourself. I bought materials and could not get anywhere with Aircraft Spruce for quotes back in the day. They now have the Cdn office which has made it better. I talked to them about a quote one day and they wondered why I was not ordering from them. I told them that others quotes to my inquiries & gave me discounts so ACS was not competitive. They set me up as a dealer because they know as a builder that there is a lot of shopping. Ask ACS if they will set you up as a dealer so that you can get the discounts. It is about 15% for normal materials and less for electroncs because there is not much mark up. I still went out for quotes on our Dynon and Wicks won that after years of going with ACS. If there are other builders in the circle then they can buy under your number. The local flying club bought all their materials under my number & a couple club members have included their needs in with our orders. If ACS will give you a dealer number then it saves shopping around. Being in the GTA you have so many opportunities for aluminum & steel. I live an hour from the border so I had the order shipped to a warehous and went over to pick it up. Shiping on the US side is cheap. Our dollar was 10% over par which helped a lot back then.
On the credit cards. All the vendor pricing is fattened to compensate for the %'s that the cards take for the transactions. Premium cards take more for the transactions. I had Wicks assemble the order with my credit card & they released the shipment when the bank money order arrived.
My life was engineering for a papermill and we always went out for quotes on materials & services. Purchasing negotiated for us where I learned a lot. The process has to be ethical and no giving of the numbers from one vendor to another so they can price match. If one does that the vendors will quit working with a person. Shopping around will get you the best prices and not always from the same source.
I think the aluminum cost about $6600 after discounts. At 15% that is about a $1000. The steel was about $4k so at 20% discount that was about an $800. I did material take offs for all the hardware, pulleys etc and went for quotes. I think that was $2800 after a 20% discount for another $600. This was around $2000 in savings. It is one way of stretching a dollar.
Good luck with your build.
Glenn
