wombat

Well, I am not sure what the USPS was doing for the last two weeks, but my spare keys finally showed up. Next stop: Key shop to have extra copies made.

I've asked my shop to try, they will stop by with their ring of keys sometime.

I had three keys previously, all different. The door and baggage door I can get replaced without too much problem, but the ignition is an issue.

So I lost the keys to my plane. Luckily it's unlocked in the hangar so I can at least get inside it. Yes, I had a spare set of keys at the shop, so I asked them to mail the keys to me. The spare set never showed up. Now I'm trying to figure out how to get a replacement set of keys for the plane. Does anyone have any good ideas?

I too have a '64 M20E and had a leaking boost pump. My plane had a dukes and I replaced it with the Weldon last summer; it was a drop-in replacement. About $800 for a new pump from aircraft spruce plus an hour or so of A&P time.

I just talked to David, and while has has a new stub spar, he is unable to find an A&P willing to go to his home field (It's a small strip) to work on it. He can't really take it anywhere because it's completely unairworthy. It's in a hangar so not really degrading very much and he has hopes of getting some work done on it over the next year or two. In the meantime he bought a Stinson and has been flying that (got his tailwheel endorsement to fly it).

I doubt their claims because they don't have statistically significant data available that proves their claims and they have financial incentive to overstate the benefits of their product. I would like to put their exhaust on, but it's a gamble to do so... Will the cost of purchasing and installing the exhaust and the extra time the aircraft is down waiting for it pay off in fuel savings, engine savings, increased airspeed sale price? If they had more data I'd be able to make a more informed opinion. But without that data I am just going on my pessimistic opinion of humanity and wild guesses. As for the ELT; a new 406MHz ELT is a lot more than the $47.50 that it cost to replace the antenna on my existing one. On Aircraft Spruce it was $579 for th ACK. So I saved myself $520 on this annual. Yes, it would be safer to have the new one. It would be safer to have a new engine. And a new airframe. And a second engine. And a full-time CFII-MEI. And a second GPS. And a third VOR, and redundant attitude indicators... And on and on. There is no end in sight. We each have to figure out where our budget intersects with our desire for safety and speed and comfort. This year mine crossed at a new antenna. Maybe when the battery runs out it'll cross at a new ELT.

Annual is finally complete and I went and got my plane yesterday. The new exhaust is awesome, I probably got 95 mph speed increase and burn 54 GPH less fuel. (Just joking, it works just like before only doesn't have cracks spewing CO into the cabin) The shop re-rigged the ailerons and flaps back to factory zero and the plane flies straight hands free now. It used to have a noticeable bank to the left even with some right rudder. The new prop cable (and re-positioning it between the throttle and mixture) is great. The new cable even came with the standard blue vernier. Idle RPM and mixture is fixed. I now see about 75 RPM rise from 1000 RPM when I lean, and pulling the throttle all the way results in idle at 625 to 650 RPM. Two new problems have cropped up. The new fuel gauges seem to be quite temperamental; they both seem to indicate full when the tanks are full and empty when the tanks are empty, but everything in between changes second to second. I can see the movement from fuel sloshing, but I can tap the gauge and have it go from showing 1/4 to 3/4 or the other way around. I'll work on this over time. I think I should be able to buy individual gauges to fit into the Garwin cluster for this model. Also, the ammeter doesn't seem to show anything negative, but that's OK with me. The flaps will no longer stay down. It now takes 1 to 5 minutes for them to come up when they should be staying down, but they do tend to come up. I'm hoping that this is just some debris in the valve that will flush away after a while. If not I'll probably have the valve rebuilt. So overall, despite spending a lot of money on this annual, I'm happy that the plane is now in good flying shape again and isn't worth less than it was before. I still wonder if I wouldn't have been happier with spending more on some upgrades, but I figure I can do that some other year. The upgrades I would consider first are: Modern engine analyzer. Electronic ignition. Powerflow exhaust (despite my comments in another thread that I don't believe they produce quite the improvement the company claims, I do think the exhaust does produce some extra power by being tuned for a specific RPM and scavenging exhaust gasses out of the cylinders.) So hopefully I'll know well ahead of time the next time I have a large expense coming up in one of these areas and I can make a little improvement in the plane. So now, on to flying! The weather has been beautiful and if I wasn't stuck inside working all weekend I'd be conducting systems tests all weekend.

cctsurf: I'm in agreement with you that each person should make their own decision. Unfortunately, I find that your anecdotal evidence is unconvincing. What I do find compelling is the fact that they have not run their exhausts on a dynamometer in comparison to a stock exhausts in order to generate a statistically significant set of test results which would be extremely useful to their sales and marketing department. They have a single result where with the stock exhaust the engine was producing 83% power to begin with and their exhaust still produced less than 100% power. I do think that they are producing a quality product and their ideas are good, but I don't think that the exhausts are really producing a 10+% performance gain. I think that the gain that we do get with the exhaust is exaggerated by the placebo effect. Just like all of the speed mods with speed gains posted on them, the fuel burn savings of LOP ops and an EI and the Powerflow... If I took all of these at face value I would expect a 30MPH speed increase at 3GPH less.... That would put me 170KTAS on 7 GPH. Hank: Yes, that was my muffler and exhaust headers. Everything but the tailpipe.

I just went through my annual and decided not to go with a powerflow exhaust. I figured that a full replacement of my existing exhaust was about $1,700 but the Powerflow was about $4,600 and I would need to save 500 extra gallons of avgas before that was worth it. While I expect that there is some improvement in performance, I don't think it's as much as their advertisements lead you to believe. (FYI, a 0 knot speed increase can also be stated as "Top speed capability improved by as much as 6.5 knots at 11,500 feet")

I recently had a fuel gauge issue that is similar to your issue with the right gauge. I sent it out to Kelly Instruments, who does quite a few repairs. They said that it was a non-fixable fault inside the gauge itself. My suspicion is that it is a short somewhere inside the gauge, perhaps part of the coil that physically moves the needle. I'm planning on getting my old gauge and tearing it apart if I can to see what's going on. My left gauge is what is broken, so maybe we can work together and create a single working gauge cluster.

The shop my plane is at is a MSC.

And are they both out of 1967 model year planes?

Are they both the same 22-169-071 part?

Can either of you give me the serial number of the plane these came out of? My mechanic isn't finding a schematic that makes sense to him for these gauges.

Do I need the shunt if I'm replacing the 22-166-010? I'm all for each of you talking each other down on price.

Thanks for thinking of me, Mooniac15u. I've got a line on one of these already from another use here, I'm just waiting to confirm that I can use it. The one I am replacing is a 22-166-010, and the two differences are: Mounting brackets I'm confident we can make it work, a few rivets and some grinding and I should be in business. The ammeter on the 22-169-071 goes from -60 to +60 and on the 22-166-010 it goes from 0 to +60 This may be a problem, my mechanic is going to look at the schematics to see if he can make it work. I really like the idea of being able to swap the individual instruments out, which you can't do on the 22-166-010.

So I've found a Garwin 22-169-07 available from a user here, and the two differences between the two that I can find now are: The brackets are different. I don't think this is a big deal, I should be able to make something work with this. The ammeter on the new one has a -60 to +60 range and my existing one is from 0 to +60. Has anyone tried using this before? I don't mind if it just never registers negative amps, but it does need to read the positive amps correctly. Does anyone have schematics of how they are wired in? Bob: Yup, I remember stopping by and chatting with you. Is the $652 for the full Mitchell gauge cluster or is that just for the digital aerospace fuel gauges only?

I my home shop sent the cluster in to Kelly Aerospace, who said it was not repairable. I called LASAR and they pointed me back to Kelly Aerospace. I PM'd dcrogers about the one with the bad ammeter already but have not heard back yet. I have now PM'd n74795 as well. greghermans had posted last fall about parting a plane out, so I PM'd him too. N601RX, this is the set that is combined into one unit, as seen here. I don't think that your slide-in will work for me. Don: From talking with the folks at Kelly, if they have a 22-166-010 with the fuel gauge working they can try to swap them out, but it's not guaranteed. Are you thinking of the models where each instrument is actually a separate unit or do you have knowledge that swapping the gauges out of the guts of the single-unit Garwin is actually a highly successful operation? Mine is not the ones like Brian has in his plane as seen here.

So the shop that did a bench test on my gauge cluster said that the left fuel gauge is totally dead and nobody can do a repair on it. The symptom is that if the power is on, I've read through several of the previous threads on this and there is a lot of rumor and hearsay about who is willing to do repairs; has anyone had one repaired recently? Does anyone have a working one for sale?

My annual is still in progress, it's been a doozy so far. The only unresolved issue is the fuel gauge. They sent it out to another shop in New Jersey to test it and they said it was totally dead and they couldn't repair it. There are serviceable used ones available which will have basically a $0 install cost, which is a big savings over a new digital system. Does anyone know of any shops that might do a repair or does anyone have a serviceable used one?

I'm also looking at the CGR-30P; it's smaller and looks like it'll fit better. I guess it depends on what I can do with my existing gauges.

Thanks, I'll call them. I'm kind of looking forward to having a new engine monitor, but $3500+ will buy a LOT of avgas. 890 gallons at Chehalis, WA. That's nearly 100 hours of flight time. More, if I have a good engine monitor and can run LOP... Hmmm....