Hey Larry!
I expected to get whalloped after my gear-up last year. Mine only went up a couple of hundred bucks. I get mine through Butler Brown and, as a lifetime member of the Antique Aircraft Association, I get a modest discount. But insurance...varies.
I pay 1800 bucks for 40K hull and a one grand in-motion deductable. Sounds a whole lot better than the nearly four grand I paid Avemco the previous year. Difference is had my gear locked in straight and upright position the year before, Avemco would have been a bargain.
The less expensive insurance carriers check the time you have on your engine and prop, and it's mighty hard to avoid a prop strike and a tear down if you land gear up. If the engine has, say, 500 hours on it, and the published TBO is 1200 as it is on O-435s and Franklins, then the insurace will pay less than 60% of the tear down, inspection, and reassembly costs. They figure you've already gotten 40+ percent of the value of the engine already. Same goes for the prop. I had my engine overhauled in 2005 along with my prop. Thus, in 2006, they couldn't pull that one on me. The damned airplane had been stuck in an annual inspection from April to June just prior to my post-annual test flight.
Avemco has no such provisions.
For the likes of you, Larry, who can do the teardown and such yourself, and who has a Bellanca with a less troublesome gear operating system, then the choice is clear. It's clear to me too as Russell is now in the process of redoing my entire hydraulic system, and I have low times (though not for long, I hope).
If you had, say, a late model Viking OTOH, with a mid-time engine....I might think twice.
Jonathan
