SP does not reduce the dealer cost for discontinued items. Consequently SP dealers pay the same for a regulator whether it has been discontinued or not. The difference is that with a discontinued reg they are no longer limited to the MSRP minus 10% discount limitations.wtxblaze:
However that in no way eliminates the possibility or desireability for dealers to give deep discounts on the items. When you consider that the markup on SP regs is on the order of 100% to 125% over dealer cost (with more expensive models having a higher markup), the dealer has quite a bit of room to discount a discontinued reg and still make money. Plus if they sell a discontinued X650 with a still in production first stage like the Mk 25 or Mk 17, they can apply the larger discount to the whole package.
I know a few dealers who stock up on discontinued items to give them an inventory of in store items and specials that they can use to beat Leisure Pro prices. In the real world where on-line products are something dealers will have to live with (particularly with companes like Scubapro who probably make on the order of 30% of their gross sales off regs sold through grey market sources and consequently refuse to do anything other than give lip service to controlling grey market sales) taking full advantage of the removal of pricing restrictions on discontinued regs is just good business.
The question I am dying to have answered is why would a diver need a new purge cover. I have bene using D300's, D350's and D400's for over 20 years and have never managed to break tear or lose a purge cover for a D400 or it predecessors. Given the almost total lack of need for parts like that, SP will limit production to only the occassional run of replacement parts. An SP dealer can usually call around and find a replacement on another dealer's shelf and if not, when the demand is obvious, SP will most likely make another batch of them.diveprof:
The same "problem" existed with R080 and R109/R156 exhaust Tees and SP resolved the problem with a production run of universal tees that works on both cases.
In my experience, SP does an excellent job of keeping the commonly needed soft parts and annual service kits in stock - even for regs that have been discontinued for decades. Plus they tend to use an evolutionary design process where new parts are retrofittable into old regulators. For example the current R190 annual service kits are retrofitted into the R080 High Performance - a design that dates to the late 1960's. Similarly, the R109 Adjustable dating from the same period can be updated with the Currnet G250/S600 poppet assembly giving a current ocurse for parts and G250/S600 performance in a 40 year old second stage. There is no other company on the planet that offers that level of long term parts and service support
At this point the only SP second stages you can't get serviced are the Air 1, the Pilot and the 1rst generation AIR 2 inflator/octo and all of them are at least 25 years old. Given that the X650 is an odd design with little in common with other SP regs that was made in fairly low numbers over short period of time (like the Pilot and Air 2) that it is reasonable to suspect that SP will discontinue parts support for them in a relatively short period of time - about 20 years if history is any predictor.
Plus if you buy it from SP, the lifetime parts and service warranty guarantees that if they discontinue parts and service support for it, they will replace it with a new second stage of comparable performance - which is one of the reasons they support DC'd regs for as long as they do.
