Vance Harral

I'm happy for you and sad for Byron, but the history of two individual engines is not evidence that a factory reman is generally more reliable than an overhaul. That's what makes these decisions difficult, there doesn't seem to be much data other than individual anecdotes. Plenty of folks happy with overhauls and plenty of folks unhappy with factory reman, opposite of your and Byron's experiences. Hard to guess what any particular individual's experience is going to be.

It looks like you understand that yokes and shafts must be matched together. Not sure if you understand that the length and design of the forward end of the shaft where it attaches to the elevator and aileron linkages has also varied over the years. If you purchase a set of yokes *and shafts* from a J or later model instead of the official Mooney retrofit kit, there is a good chance they will not properly connect to the elevator and aileron linkages in your C model. More info here:

Dealer installation required for "ADAHRS variant" (i.e. as an attitude indicator), A&P installation OK for non-ADAHRS variant: https://support.garmin.com/en-US/?faq=zZe6ycoT1q4hi7MbTE7TP9

This is the only relevant argument. If you can't/won't provide digital copies of the logs in 2021, about 90% of the potential market (real buyers, not tire kickers) aren't even going to consider your airplane, much less come look at it in person.

My understanding - based purely on internet lore, not any actual research - is that you have to send your core to the factory in order to purchase a factory reman (so they can use your parts in some future reman). It was also my understanding there is an upcharge from the factory if your core's crank or case is bad on arrival, as they won't be able to re-use it. If that's true, you'll pay extra for a bad crank or case either way, so it's not correct to say that a factory reman is nearly the same price vs. overhaul if you need a new crank and/or case. If that understanding is incorrect, please educate me. I believe the cam is nearly always replaced by reputable overhaul shops, and not particularly expensive in the grand scheme of things.

That's literally the $10,000 question. I don't know of any good statistical data on this, unfortunately. Just anecdotes. Even if you had statistical data, it's hard to argue it would be meaningful. No one here is buying a fleet of engines, and that's the only thing statistical data would really be valid for.

Sure, I don't disagree with your logic. But the quotes are what they are, possibly just because that's what the market will bear around here. Mainly just cautioning the OP and others reading the thread to get actual "walk-away price" installation quotes to determine the cost difference when making their own decision. If you've got the time and a good relationship with an A&P, and you're handy enough, you can do some/all of the installation yourself. For the DIY club, the points about fewer connectors/mounts/etc. with the GI-275 are certainly attractive.

Sounds like the internal contacts of the switch are worn and/or dirty. You might be able to clean them up by shooting contact cleaner into the internal guts of the switch, but it depends on how "sealed" the switch is. If it's the old Klixon-style switch, I'd suggest carefully removing the plastic cover, spraying some contact cleaner into the switch, and working it back and forth a bunch of times. May not resolve the problem, but it's a cheap and easy thing to try, and very unlikely to cause any additional problems.

I haven't seen any compelling evidence that a factory-rebuilt "zero time" engine is more reliable than a reputable overhaul. A factory rebuilt engine is assembled from a combination of new and used parts. The latter must meet new tolerances, but they're still used (which is arguably a good thing: used parts have survived at least some time in service). So understand that what you get for the extra cost vs. a traditional overhaul from a reputable shop is just the knowledge and expertise of the factory itself in assembling the engine. You can decide for yourself what that's worth, but I'm not sure the folks in the Lycoming shop have anything on well-known, non-factory shops. You certainly don't have to look hard to find stories of issues with factory rebuilds. If that bugs you, you can go factory new instead of factory-rebuilt. No used parts. But now you're looking at roughly twice the cost, and again, it's not clear new parts are actually more reliable than used.

Having just been through this, our partnership opted for G5s instead of GI-275s, basically due to cost. The cost of the units themselves is part of that. But for reasons that still aren't clear to me, local shops (Denver area) were quoting substantially more to install GI-275s than G5s. That made the walk-away price an unattractive tradeoff for the additional features - which weren't that compelling to us. Those quotes don't really jive with what folks here are saying about installation costs, and again, I'm not sure why. It's possible the GI-275s are still new enough that shops are hedging their bets on complications, or maybe it's just what the market will bear for the shiniest of new toys. You mentioned flush mounting. In our airplane (1976 M20F), the instruments are spaced closely enough in the stock panel that there is not room to install the flush mount bracket without impinging on the adjacent ASI/TC and ALT/VSI. Flush mounting would have required cutting a whole new panel. So we are living with the less-endearing, non-flush mount. I don't really notice it sitting in the left seat, but when I glance over from the right seat while instructing/safety-piloting, it's certainly a noticeable "wart". That said, with about 10 hours behind the G5, I'm really happy with it. I wanted to train myself to fly EFIS style, so I went up the other day with a safety pilot and flew approaches with all the steam gauges covered up (with 800+ hours behind the steam gauges I found myself constantly "reverting" to them). Took about 15 minutes to get dialed in, then it was easy as pie. I'm sure the GI-275s are similar. You really can't go wrong with either unit.

Do you have a video or photo of this in action? It looks like a really clever idea, and I have one of those yoke mounts just sitting in my basement gathering dust. But I'm having trouble understanding how you set the oil filter into the clamp in such a way that the cutting wheel rotates around the part of the filter you want to cut while applying pressure via the screw knob. The setups I'm visualizing would "grind" rather than slide/rotate, and that just seems like it wouldn't work very well.

If that is the same stuff as in our 1976 M20F (and it appears to be), it is not paint or powder coating. It is a vinyl overlay that is glued to the backing metal. I know this because our panel has some locations where the vinyl is peeling away from the underlying metal. If you look at the attached photo, to the upper right of the gear switch, you can see a wrinkle in the material and a chip out of it. I do not know of a source for this material, but neither have I searched for one. Just thought it would be helpful to you to know that if you want to match the vintage panel, you're not looking for paint/powder coat.

I chose invulnerability as the one I'm most susceptible to. But for me, it's not so much "It won't happen to me", as it is "What I'm doing has increased risk, but I'm going to do it anyway, because a lot of other reasonable people do it too, and I've done it in the past without coming to grief". I speak here of reasonable assumption of additional risk, e.g. flying in IMC, flying over mountainous terrain, deliberately performing slipping and skidding stalls as part of CFI training, and so forth. Lots of people do these things. The risks are reasonable. But sometimes people die doing these things, and the honest truth is that I don't have to do any of them. In fact, I don't ever have to get in an airplane at all. My mild beef with the way the FAA treats the five hazardous attitudes is, the textbook stuff seems to treat them as binary things, when in reality they span a spectrum of increasing risk. Invulnerability is an example of this, as discussed above. Another: I submit that a certain amount of machismo and "I can do it!" attitude is required to be any kind of pilot at all. A person with absolutely zero I-can-do-it attitude is never going to climb into the left seat for their first lesson. If I was writing the textbooks, I'd say the five attitudes in excess are of concern, but that all humans exhibit all those behaviors to some degree from time to time. It's part of what makes us human.

One of my airplane partners came up with an analogy I like about this sort of stuff: Push-ups are a common exercise in many workout routines. But the action your muscles perform to execute a push-up are not an action you really use in work or play. So why do we do them? Because while the push-up action itself may have little/no use, it builds muscles that are useful: for general strength, and for particular actions that have some things in common with push-ups. So it is with the commercial pilot maneuvers. The point is not that you'll use those maneuvers in commercial flying. Think of them as "skill" push-ups: learning to perform those maneuvers strengthens your skills in a positive way, even if the maneuvers themselves have little direct application. One can say the same thing about your CFII simulating a simultaneous failure of your AI, DG, GPS, and iPad. This is so unlikely to happen in real life that it's arguably an absurd scenario. But it's a mental push-up: it builds mental muscle that aids you in any kind of instrument failure scenario, and even when everything's working.

Thanks for the reference, the fact that the ACS calls back to the AFH is a good point. Still, it seems a little odd to me that the steep spiral has such a nebulous definition, when other performance maneuvers in the ACS/PTS are quantitatively defined. e.g. steep turns call for specific bank angles, short field landings give specific tolerances on hitting your intended spot, etc. The ACS on the steep spiral also has a knowledge element that indicates one is supposed to "demonstrate understanding of the purpose of steep spirals". I've heard a few variations on what the purpose of a steep spiral is supposed to be, and made up an answer or two myself. But most of the standard explanations seem to grasp at straws. If I'm on fire or have a medical emergency on board, I'm going to execute an Emergency Descent, which is a completely separate maneuver with different procedures (it's also required in the commercial ACS, as a separate skill). If I have ever actually have an engine failure and arrive over a great landing spot with altitude to spare, I'm going to fly a minimum-sink-rate circle, which maximizes my time to get ready - i.e. the exact opposite of a rapid descent. One real-life purpose I can come up with for the steep spiral is that it's a pretty cost-effective way to get a skydiving or towing airplane back on the ground in a hurry for the next load/glider/banner/whatever. But what the King Air and Twin Otter do at my local jump zone looks a lot more like an "emergency descent" to me than a "steep spiral". A steep spiral is also a way to wind down through a smaller-than-you-hoped hole in an undercast, when your VFR-over-the-top plan didn't work out like you thought it would. But that sort of decision making was already being frowned on when I started flying, over 30 years ago. I think most examiners would be nonplussed if you offered that up as a rationale for the maneuver.

Oddly enough, the ACS doesn't quantitatively define anything at all about what's supposed to be "steep" in a steep spiral. Minimum bank angle? Not specified, it just says the maximum bank is 60 degrees. Minimum descent rate? Descent rate is not mentioned at all. Speed? You get to pick the "specified" airspeed. I sometimes argue you can climb up high, fly a lazy, shallow-banked turn around a specified point at minimum sink airspeed, and meet the ACS standards for a "steep" spiral. A DPE may grouse that doing so isn't in the spirit of things, but s/he won't be able to point to anything in the ACS that you violated.

For what it's worth, I don't pay any attention to sub-forums when consuming Mooneyspace content. I have my bookmark set to "New Posts" (across all forums), and could care less what content is posted in what sub-form. Out of respect for people who don't consume content that way, I do try to be careful about selecting an appropriate sub-forum on the rare occasions when I start a new thread. But otherwise, I don't pay any attention. My guess is a bunch of other people consume web-forum content the same way I do, and that may be why it's hard for new sub-forums to gain the kind of traction you're discussing.

I did this a couple of years ago due to slop in the bolts/bushings. There's a thread on it here: https://mooneyspace.com/topic/25238-replacing-over-center-link-bushings-to-re-establish-clearance-to-main-gear-trusses/ I removed the entire main gear to do the work. I don't think it's possible to completely remove all the retract links without doing so, because the main gear truss interferes with the removal of one of the bolts, no matter where you position it in the swing cycle. Someone with more experience may have a trick, but I couldn't find one.

Already corresponded with flyingchump about this, but for others reading the thread... the reason multiple bolts are listed with "AR" is that the length of bolt you need depends on how your particular hand-crafted aircraft came together at the factory. The spacing between the retract link and the "tension strap" (the thick piece of aluminum riveted to the spar structure) varies from airplane to airplane, so shims are inserted into the assembly as needed to make everything match up. The length of bolt you need to snug things together depends on the number of shims. The "AR" in the parts manual just means (A)s (R)equired. In other words, you have to take the old bolt out to figure out what length you need as a replacement.

That's exactly my question, actually. I know what the line "is". I just don't have a firm grasp of what it's supposed to mean to me as a pilot; or why it gets a specific depiction vs. just looking at the pressure gradient contour lines that arguably already give you the information it's depicting.

I've been trying to figure out if there is a reasonable way to connect a Garmin navigator to two CDIs at the same time, to solve the same problem as you: maintaining an existing interface to a Brittain autopilot. The place I get stuck is the OBS knobs of the CDIs. When navigating via VOR, or when navigating via GPS in OBS mode, the OBS knob matters, and the two CDIs can have different OBS settings. Even if there is some way to make this work with selector switches, it has the potential to be tremendously confusing, and my opinion is it's probably not a good idea.

Thanks for the explanation about the counterweights, that sounds reasonable. I'm less convinced about the thermal argument, but no need to start a debate on it. What's most important is that you have a set of procedures that work well for you, and you obviously do. Enjoyed the video, thanks for posting.

"Surge" is a vague term. Any chance you can elaborate on the exact concern with quickly advancing the throttle? Inability of the fuel servo to keep up with the sudden change in air volume? Inability of the prop governor to change the blade pitch quickly enough to maintain RPM? Something associated with the turbocharger? Something else? Enquiring minds want to know.

The thing that really jumped out at me about this document is, the sections for starting engines and ground run-ups are not check lists. They are textual, prescriptive descriptions of how to perform the procedure. That's helpful if you're in ground school trying to learn how to start and run up those magnificent radials in a DC-3. But I'd think anyone actually trying to use them as a checklist in the airplane would have trouble, and be prone to skip items. If that's not a problem in practice, feel free to ignore my comment. Those sections just look really incongruous compared to the rest of the document.

The partnership -> club number is 5, at least as of 2 months ago. We just added a 4th partner to our partnership, so that's pretty recent info from one broker plus Avemco.