Hi Rob I know where you are coming from but the average customer just looks at his own problem in hand . If it doesn,t start they ask around to find out the cause or contact there local deler . Then at the end of the day they find out they have no choice to buy new ones and feel there fighting a lost cause . Then the customer gets his new items when they have stock and really doen,t feel the point in putting in a report because they aren,t getting any thing for the time for paper work . That is just human nature to look after number one first the only true real way is to offer a small percent discount with trading parts that Didn,t make there design TBO . To be honest they need parts back to see what goes wrong with parts out in service no report form is going to tell them which chip went on the circuit board unless there a hitic customer . I think people would fill out a form for a little discount and hand old parts in(so gets them out of secondhand market) fill form out with hours and engine number and they then would get a true failure rate on items . All lot of the outboard companys in Australia have a country wide history of hours and service and owners names of engines . I would have thought would all the paper work around aircraft one would hope rotax would have bought in a system like that . Far as the new soft start modules good so far haveen,t seen a dead one but still heard,of starter sprag clutches giving up around 1400 hours make so that is still a problem not getting to TBO of 2000 on let engines .
Cheers dan
