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Thanks M! There is a Quality vs. Quantity comparison coming next… There used to be a ‘liked post’ count… kind of a Quality measurement… Byron was leading the Quality of posts count for a long time… up there with Doc… I probably had to write 10 lengthy posts to Byron’s single statements… See if you can find my first post… back in 2009. Where I stumbled upon MS, while looking for info on the M20J Missile… I was interested to learn about Rocket Engineering, WnB, and the IO550… Along the way… I have met thousands of great MSers! My life has been enriched by MooneySpace… 50K post count is coming… let’s celebrate with a Mooney fly-in! Mark my words…. Time flys at Mooney speeds… Best regards, and thank you to all…, - a -

We’re into jugs not vibrators.

Hey everyone, thought I’d give you an update. I’m officially an aircraft owner! Had the mechanics spend two days looking over everything mentioned and all turned out great. Just a couple of squawks to bleed the brakes, the flaps and added an ADSB on the tail (owner paid for it). Also a small amount of mouse poop in the insulation… but all tubular structure was checked and good to go. Insulation removed. Huge thank you to all of you and also a big thank you to Tom @47U Tom went above and beyond, helped me find a good mechanic, helped identify additional areas to check and offered his own help personally to ferry if I needed. Excited to join the Mooney club and hope one day that I can pay it forward. Fly safe everyone! And if you see a guy in a Mooney with a gigantic smile waving at you in the LA area… I apologize in advance.

Yeah, I spent 8 bucks at Home Depot to buy a neodymium magnet just so I could watch it fall off my elevator weight It sure stuck to the iron rivets, though!

Do you guys have any idea how this guy has won an entire year's worth of Mooneyspace days? I don't even know what it means to win a day, but this guy has won an entire year's worth! I don't know if he deserves our congratulations or pity. Similar to this guy who ran an entire marathon every day for a year: https://explorersweb.com/marathon-every-day-2022/ @carusoam ran a marathon of Mooneyspace for an entire year

Anthony is the bedrock cornerstone of MS and Im glad to call him my friend.

Finally someone figured out what the Mooney factory needs to do to get back to selling a lot of airplanes! I hope Mooney is listening! Rewind to 2:45 to hear about the new Tailwheel Bonanza to give you mad skillz.

Whenever I look at a RV10 I think that would be a great replacement for my 67 F, but when I step away and look at the much higher acquisition costs, the build time, higher fuel burn for the same speed, and lower baggage compartment weight capacity, I am happy to keep my old Mooney another year. While a new experimental with all the wizz bang electronics would be nice, I just want to fly and a lightweight 67 F with manual gear/flaps and a couple simple ADs sure is hard to improve upon.

Well done, ladies and gents!

-10F is still pretty warm.

I went through this exercise as well and ended up buying a B36 Bonanza. I think we all flew in it maybe 3 times. After 2 years, I added it up and 98% of flying time was less than 3 people and +80% was just me. Sold the Bo and bought the Ovation. Everyone complained, but I was happy and now It is just me and my wife at home and we fly to see the kids or parents. Of fly to vacations and let the kids take commercial . I still toy with the idea of getting a single turbo prop, but the mooney is such a great traveling machine for 2 people.

I took everyone’s advice on here and am thankful for all of it. So even if you think I made the wrong decision - thanks for letting me know what to look out for. I looked at the risk, decided it was right for me, and pulled the trigger. For reference - Borescope and compressions were immaculate. I called all the previous mechanics that worked on it, did my due diligence and found out about the entire history of the plane. Checked the tubular structure, the wing spars, literally everything that was listed and recommended on this post and with a 3rd party mechanic the seller agreed to fly the plane to. Everything came back in great condition. Mechanic even told me he would buy the plane if I didn’t… Only thing I didn’t check was a cylinder which my mechanic and I agreed is probably a large undertaking for a seller. I negotiated the price, and am comfortable with the reality that this might be a dud engine in a year or two. To me - I am getting a plane that I can invest in and mold into my perfect aircraft. Which is what I want to do. I might even be getting the deal of a lifetime - but I’m not betting on it. I’ll follow up with you guys down the road of course, but I think I’m buying a decent plane at a reasonable cost. Will still follow up with photos as well!

A jet from the 335th fighter squadron in North Carolina always had an Iraqi helo painted on it from Desert Storm. Didn’t “count” as a kill though… they hit it with a lasar guided bomb. Helo took off right about release, wso just kept the lasar on the helo and the bomb went right through it. I always thought that was cool. Probably better than a balloon…

Normally on the cabin side of the firewall on the copilots side.

Everything you need to know (and more) about tires. aviation-tire-care-2020.pdf

c’mon David… 1) go Mooney, or go home! 2) go Comanche 400, or you left too much power on the table! 3) can you get a parachute with that? 4) How good is the partner? 5) MSers don’t let other MSers make inferior choices… 6) The carb’d, big Lycoming is OK… but, better with the fuel injection and turbo… 7) If going with a laminar flow wing like the Comanche… wouldn’t you prefer to have the Mooney..? 8) All that FF without the max speed… that’s unamerican and un-Texan…. 9) what would your dad say? 10) I ran out of teasing by line 10…. Send an invite to @M20Doc for an inverse of this post… M20Cs make great forever planes… and probably are more cost efficient than brand P and C…. Let the fun begin… Go MS! Best regards, -a-

It would be just as easy to say short weights don’t have a steel plug and long weights might, use a magnet to determine if the steel plug is installed.

What if you install it in a Mooney Rocket?

its a 20k a month 16 day sentence. Some might say thats worth the trade. some not. Also some have pre-formed opinions about how good or bad the job is with no data. I hear people all the time trashing airline jobs, but they've never been there done that. I fly airplanes for real money, but I work on planes because I can make a difference and it interests me. And I own a plane for a lot of the reasons we all do, to go somewhere, for fun, for developing and maintaining skills.

I have several times seen Anthony called the Dean of Mooneyspace. Well earned. No peers on that.

If you communicate with certainty, I've found controllers to be very accommodating in Socal. I always start with "If able" when I'm asking for something. Having said that, with family in San Diego I've made that trip countless times from KSJC. In fact, I just got back from KRNM a couple of days ago. Certainly it helps to have the instrument rating. Without it, for your trip, I'd take the high road and go relatively direct at 11,500 with O2 and come back at 12,500. I'd go KRHV-LHS-CA76-SAMOS-KSEE and come in the back way. This keeps you out of the Class B airspace. Have a good trip or call me to further discuss it. (408-499-9910)

I’ve seen a lot worse. The corners are a common leak point. If you don’t top off your tanks unless you are going somewhere, you could put it off for a while. To properly repair it will require opening that cell. You can probably get away with just removing the bottom panel. As usual taking care of the access panel is more work than fixing the leak. The procedure is in the maintenance manual. If you follow it you will be successful. If you take shortcuts, you will probably fail. The Don Maxwell method isn’t about fixing the leak, it is about finding it. The fixing part is just by the manual.

If your F model had electric gear it had similar issues that were single-point failure locations that would disable the manual and electric deployment at the same time, and there were also failures that could defeat the manual deployment that you might not know about until you needed it. The clutch spring should be, and evidently almost always is, a high reliability item. It is possible to assess and engineer around all anticipatable failure modes, no matter how unlikely, but you wind up with a product that is too expensive and or heavy or complex to be useful. Also, if you keep adding hardware to back up other hardware, you sometimes just add new failure modes and unecessary complexity. Part of good engineering is knowing when to stop.

There are so many views expressed here on our forum and all are important. Each comes from experience and some of that experience comes with past pain. What others gain is the ability to learn and weigh decisions. Our dear new owner here used what he learned from other's experiences and has made a decision he can live with. I'm looking forward to hear about his experience and his journey with this prior loved airplane that will be loved once again. Congratulations on your purchase and the beginning of a new love affair. Now, where are those photos of this beauty?

I did something similar when I bought my airplane. Ended up replacing the engine sooner rather than later, but I was prepared for that, so no big deal, The most important thing is a good sound airframe -- everything else is bolted on,

I don't think the analogy to a clock spring is accurate because this is a wrap spring and they are different. It would be interesting to take one of these apart which I've never done. But looking at Eaton's exploded diagrams and description it seems possible to make some educated guesses about how they work. First, the problem they are trying to solve is that the actuator needs a brake. Lead screw actuators that use an acme thread such as the trim jack screw have enough friction to be self locking for the same reason you cannot push on a nut threaded onto a bolt and cause the bolt to turn. But the friction also makes it harder for the motor to turn the screw to move the load. So, for highly loaded actuators, a ball screw is used where the screw threads ride on ball bearings. This type of screw has much lower friction, but now when the load applies tension or compression to the screw it can back drive the actuator. The Mooney landing gear will stay down due to over-center locks. But there are no up locks and the weight of the gear would back drive the actuator if there were no brake. Within the Eaton actuator gear train there is a shaft with an input gear on the motor side and an output gear on the screw side. The two gears are not rigidly connected but each is connected to a hub and the spring wraps around (hence the name wrap spring) the two hubs with the tang at each end attaching it to each hub. This assembly is inserted into a tubular metal shell that does not rotate. When the gear is retracted and the weight of the gear tries to turn the lead screw and thus the output gear/hub, the spring unwinds and rubs against this shell and the friction creates the braking effect. This is generically called a wrap spring brake. When you put the gear down, the input hub starts to turn and this tightens the spring around both hubs causing them to turn together thereby driving the screw. The functioning of the spring is dependent on the tangs fixing each end of the spring to it's associated hub. If the tang on the input side breaks, the input hub might turn, but the spring will not tighten around the hubs to lower the gear. Or, the broken piece might jam the mechanism preventing the gear from coming down. If you search the web for wrap spring clutches and wrap spring brakes you will find a lot of animations for how these work in general. However, I have not found any actuators that have such a simple mechanism with such a high dependence on the spring, and most have a lot more parts. It seems that this design was intended to reduce the parts count to a minimum which has the undesirable effect of making the entire mechanism dependent on the stressed spring tangs. The other problem with the design is that the emergency gear extension system only protects against electrical or motor failures and is rendered inoperative by any mechanical failure that prevents the motor shaft from turning. Skip

From "The Daily - The Bay Area's best free local newsletter": And now, after “an extensive strategic research and brand development process” conducted with an outside marketing consultant, the Bay Area’s own San Jose airport has officially changed its name. The airport formerly known as Mineta San Jose International is now called San Jose Mineta International. I wonder how much they paid their marketing consultant for that? Skip

What I appreciate is that because of people, specifically including Anthony, on this forum, there is not so much brick throwing and mostly good exchange of information. Keeps me coming back.

@Marauder is a pretty congenial and helpful person to mooneyspacers. Maybe people don’t agree with him on this, but I can kinda see his point… maybe my doc would sign, maybe he wouldn’t, but I’d like him to. Either way, Marauder has a lot of good stuff to share after a very long ownership, so be respectful. Id like him to stay here.

Seems to me that the best approach to preventive maintenance is to just replace the entire airplane with another before anything fails. You don't even need a logbook entry.

Zero time means the engine comes with a new and blank log book. Only the factory or its contracted and authorized builders can give you a zero time engine. It does not mean it is better. In fact a "field overhaul to new tolerances" like Gann does is a better engine, but it is not a zero time engine. It retains the same logbook it arrived with. What "factory zero time" does is reassure the buyer that the engine was torn apart, inspected and reassembled correctly and not by a Bubba with an A&P. I've seen field O/H that were a thing of beauty and would bring tears to your eyes, I've seen field O/H that would terrorize you just to start them. There is no such thing as "zero time" tolerances. There is new tolerances, there is overhaul tolerances, there is rejected tolerances. Most factory zero time use overhaul tolerance, but only the factory can call an engine "zero time".

and the track:

Lost my attention as soon as I saw this

I fly airplanes for fun; I fly airplanes for a paycheck. Once you realize the difference, it’s no longer a prison sentence: it’s a great paying job that gives me more than half the month off. As a bonus, nobody ever calls me on the off days, and the view out my “office” window can’t be beat.

I don't think it's LOP vs ROP -- I suspect it's power. Run them hard and they don't last as long. Mike Busch runs pretty low power. I asked him once what power he ran and he said he had no idea but it was probably 60-65%. He just has a fuel flow that he likes to run at and watches the head temps and adjusts mixture accordingly. He summed it up with, "I'm a longevity guy, not a speed guy." The airlines used to run the big radials at around 55% rated power for economy and longevity.

I don’t have a single ATP. Only a multi. My flying buddy Rene got his single ATP in a Rocket. I trained him for the test. The only instruction time I have logged. I don’t have a flight instructors rating, but an ATP is allowed to train somebody for an ATP.

There are plenty of examples on our airplanes where single point failures are Very Bad. The fuel servo is a good example. That's a critical function with no backup. There are many more examples. From an engineering perspective it just means that those things have to be designed with sufficient robustness to have a low probability of failure. In the event of stuck gear, it's not nearly as catastrophic as something like a sudden engine failure. You still get to pick when and where you're gonna land, it's just gonna cost more that time. So it's not worth the cost/weight/engineering to make it completely redundant.

I agree with everything @carusoam said above. I have a C and i’m in Canada so i know all about cold starting and flying in oats around -20c. Other than preheating, you don’t really need to do anything else. I flew a few days ago and it was -18c and the oil temp stayed in the green the whole flight. CHTs were struggling to stay in the 300s and the cabin was absolutely freezing. Not sure you can do anything about that other than simply not flying in temps that cold.

Lycoming has their iE (integrated electronics) engines that are fully certified. The experimental world has a lot of full electronic controls that people have been putting on various Lycoming engines (that I know of, and probably Continental, but I've not seen one yet). An O2 sensor helps for tuning to optimize AFR with feedback, but isn't strictly necessary. Even automotive engines have "open loop" strategies, depending on the conditions, that ignore the O2 sensor and just use the fuel map based on other sensors. I recently helped with an engine swap in an experimental airplane where they did use an O2 sensor just for data and figured they'd just run it until it dies. The G3X displays and logs it just fine. There are quite a few FADEC reciprocating aircraft engines, even for the certified market, but the quantities aren't enough and the FAA barriers to innovation are big enough that they are obviously not universal, and certainly not retrofittable to most GA aircraft.

As Eric and Minivation indicated there is an entire paper trail behind the scenes and sometimes multiple people signing that paper trail. To change a date opens up a can of worms for them and a red flag for the FAA auditors whose job it is to look for paperwork anomalies. Most FAA visits are purely paperwork visits. It can even have an affect on the operator. When I ran a shop, I had the occasion of a missed signature or other anomaly and they can ask the question if the plane flew away, implying an operational violation. Never got fined, but the implication were there. Best to always cooperate. When I set up my PMA, a nice lady at the FAA (and I do mean that) told me, “document what you do, and do exactly what you document” and you will never have a problem. Yes, they are scared, but their livelihood is at stake and it is a legitimate fear in the repair station industry.

Twelve years ago I bought a 78 J model that had lived in a hangar for > 20 yrs @ Lake Havasu City (HII), in a hot dry desert environment. Light surface corrosion was on all tubes (including aft of the firewall) and the one below the window (aft) @ the right side passenger seat had to be cut out and a new tube was welded by a FAA certified welder. The log books never indicated it living in the corrosion zone. I surmised that when the monsoon rains in Arizona occurred, it was very hot and the metal building "sweated", thus making the hangar very humid. Perhaps it sat outside in the rain prior to living in Arizona. I have owned a E, G, J, and 4 K models over ~ 40 yrs and on every one I removed the entire interior (for refurbishing) and performed the 208BSB. Six of the airplanes had the old style insulation with evidence of moisture,. The E model was junked because too many tubes were ruined. In the early years no IA suggested removing interior as part of the PPI. Jeff

Do you know if that incident involved a Plessey or an Eaton actuator? I know that Mooney was using both well into the 1990s and the accident reported by @1980Mooney(NTSB Accident Number ERA22LA319) involved a Plessey actuator with only 427 hours since spring replacement. Plessey and Eaton are similar but different designs. Plessey calls the spring a torsion spring and Eaton calls it a no-back spring. Mooney has taken to just referring to both as no-back springs. They may or may not be identical parts -- probably not. The original service instruction M20-52 from 1/15/92 listed 2 failures of springs in Plessey actuators at 1200 and 1500 hours respectively. It included GEC/Plessey service instruction SI-11 requiring replacing the spring every 1000 hours. This appears to be the origin of the 1000 Hour replacement interval. I found two additional SDR reports of failures of Plessey actuators (one a broken spring and the other of undetermined cause, but likely the spring from the description). With the accident cited above, that makes at least 4, maybe 5, Plessey spring failures. Service bulletin M20-266A cites a single failure of an Eaton spring and lists a limited number of aircraft that require removal of the Eaton actuator and it's return to Eaton. This is likely the source of the idea that it was a problem related to a particular lot of springs. Subsequently, Eaton issued service instruction SI102000-901-1 that called for inspection of ALL actuators within 100 hrs and recommended replacement of the spring at 1000 hour intervals. Mooney published this as service bulletin M20-279. Apparently, all these bulletins and instructions were causing confusion so Mooney issued a comprehensive consolidated version as M20-282A. So, after all the dust settles, as of 9/22/2004 (the issue date of M20-282A), Mooney has only noted the failure of ONE Eaton actuator spring, which may have been limited to one lot of actuators, whereas 4 or 5 Plessey actuators are known to have suffered spring failures. So, I would be concerned if I had a Plessey actuator because of the several documented failures, but I'm not so sure that the Eaton's are much of a problem. It would be nice if Mooney would publish the actual number of failures of each type. Skip

Wing washout keeps the stall inboard as the outboard sections are lower angle of attack, but it’s less efficient, most efficient is no washout, but it’s much safer especially for an aircraft maneuvering close to the ground nibbling at a stall to have washout, but that's not a Mooney’s mission. As crop dusters are nibbling at stall at every turn when heavily loaded the Thrush has 1.5 degree washout ensuring a stall will start inboard even if your a little out of trim (it’s natural for a pilot to step on the rudder to tighten a turn, we shouldn’t but most just instinctively do, bad habit) The Air Tractor has little if any washout, and got a reputation of killing pilots in the turn, so Air Tractor drivers use flaps in the turn, this washes out the wing, but of course increases drag, thereby negating the advantage of no wash out. Flaps as they increase the angle of attack, wash out a wing. It’s my opinion that Mooney’s don’t have very gentle stalls, no aircraft with stall strips do, so they tried increasing the washout, which increased drag, slightly slowing the aircraft. Mooney’s niche is good speed with less fuel burn, so they quickly decided it wasn’t worth it. It boils down to TANSTASFL. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There_ain't_no_such_thing_as_a_free_lunch

Garmin, so you don’t end up in that poor thread about the aerocruze AP with the others.

And we were all concerned with exhaust valves....

I remember what seems not long ago a well deserved thread started complimenting Anthony on reaching 20,000 posts. Since then Anthony has achieved well over twice that number. Please keep on keeping on. Your wisdom is appreciated.

Ok! Three likes so far! Keep liking my compliments of Anthony friends! If enough of you like this comment maybe … I’ll win the day?!!! Circular arguments rock. Ya never know…

It probably isn't the turbo. Most likely the waste gate (if you have one) or the pop off valve. Lets hope, they are a lot cheaper to fix.

If you go direct, or the near-direct route Don suggested, get VFR flight following. If you say what you are going to do and do what you say, ATC appreciates knowing your intentions and, I’ve found, are helpful and courteous.

Well, perhaps this counters the idea of leaving the gear down on takeoff until there is no more runway available. The plane will stop faster on the remaining runway with the gear up. Not faulting the pilot; just something to think about.