Vance Harral

That's the easy part, and yes it hardly takes any time at all. The catch is the shims that must be inserted on reassembly to make the whole assembly tight enough, but not too tight. LASAR will send you a bunch of shims to select from, but it's a guess at best, and there may be some back-and-forth exchange to get the right size. More importantly, if you haven't done it before (raises hand), you don't really know exactly what you're looking for in terms of fit. In the threads mentioned above, there are stories of people who discovered only on reassembly that they selected shims that felt

It's not necessary to remove the tail, the thread cctsuff lined to above has details. You can rebuild it yourself using parts from LASAR, but frankly it's easier and less anxiety to just send the whole thing to LASAR and let them do it for you.

I never heard any banging or clicking noises operating the ailerons by hand or via the yoke during a normal preflight. The only way I could get them to click was by manually twisting the linkages back and forth in the belly at annual, as seen in the video. For most of the time we've owned the airplane, doing this would only get the aileron links "very close" to the gear retraction torque tube. I could still slide a sheet of paper in there, and I didn't observe any wear marks, so we didn't bother with the SB. It only started actually touching a couple of years ago. We would have done the w

I confess I'm not sure what they're made of, but I don't think it's nylon or plastic. They have some heft to them, and they bounce when dropped on a shop floor (ask me how I know...) Might be aluminum.

I looked up EricJ's AC43-13 reference on cotter pins, here's a screen cap for others who might be interested.

Thanks to N201MKTurbo and EricJ for the pointers. The A&P who looked it over said it was kosher, but I'm always learning. With regard to what's in the manual, the original parts manual shows one washer under the self-locking nut, but no washer under the bolt head. The diagram in SB M20-289A shows no washers at all. I can see how the bolt head and nut could wear on the U-bracket. But again, there's basically no torque or fore/aft load on the bolt and nut, all the forces are in shear.

I see what you're saying, only one of the two cotter pin shanks is actually locking the nut. But the SB doesn't mention additional washers, so it's unclear to me if that's "authorized" (maybe it's kosher under generic 43-13 principles). In any case, I'm not particularly concerned about it. There is no meaningful torquing load on the nut that would cause it to break a castle point or to pop the cotter pin, even with only one shank holding against the nut.

We paid $220 for the kit at our local Mooney MSC (Arapahoe Aero) a few months ago - just now getting around to installing it. LASAR also has the kit listed for $236: https://lasar.com/service-bulletin-kits/service-bulletin-kit-289-m20-289-000 Not very expensive in aviation dollars, I guess, but a little frustrating. The kit contains an AN bolt, castle nut, and cotter pin that you can get from Spruce for about two bucks. The "magic" is the three specially-sized washers that exactly fill the gap where the rod ends are captured by the U-bracket.

We elected not to bother with an external GPS antenna installation when we recently had a G5 ADI installed, even though it's our primary ADI. GPS data is fed to our G5 from an external source (GTN 650 in our case, but any WAAS GPS will do). Our rationale was that the G5 does *not* become unusable if it loses GPS signal. The availability of GPS data allows the G5 to perform exceptionally good drift correction, but without that data, it can still provide "pretty good" drift correction using air data (pitot/static) to drive the drift correction filter. The shops we talked to about the

Pulled the fuel servo inlet screen today and found more junk. Cleaned and flushed with solvent. Still no smoking gun as to exactly what's causing this.

15-20 *inch* pounds is the torque spec on the gascolator. It's very light. Use caution, I broke my fuel selector last year after mis-understanding the torque spec, and finding a replacement was a saga. You can undo the rod on the nose gear door. Or, if your airplane is more workhorse than beauty queen, a long-shaft phillips screwdriver with a bit of flex in the shaft, and a willingness to bend and rub on the gear door during the deed, can also get the job done. We don't necessarily replace the gasket every year, I will re-use it a second year if it appears to be in good shape. LA

Concur with Robert. After our original loctite debacle, I'm skeptical of any "works great" story that doesn't include a positive PIREP on the ability to remove it at the next inspection.

The especially eagle-eyed will note that at some point in the history of our airplane, the bolt and nut in the "before" video were installed backward. The bolt head is supposed to be aft, and the nut forward. There is a slight downward tilt of the mechanism from aft to forward, so with the bolt head aft, the bolt would theoretically stay in place if the nut were to fall off. In the backward installation, if the nut were to come off, the bolt would be more likely to work completely loose. That's the aviation "standard", though I don't put much faith in it - I'd rather be sure nuts don't com

Guessing you've already decided on your course of action, but I finally got a fresh look at our McCauley governor and I remembered why grinding the case was necessary. In many governor installations, the part of the accessory case that receives the governor has threaded studs installed. The governor slides over the studs, then you install nuts to fasten the governor tight to the accessory case. That is not the way it's installed in Mooneys, however. Instead, the governor is installed with MS20074-05-14 bolts, which are a little over 1.5" long - see item #25 in the parts manual pic belo

Not sure why the before video is embedded and the after is not, but you can click the link.