EricJ

Yes, not sure why you're having an interference issue, though. This is mine installed. Fuel servo is still there, fittings are probably just out of the shot. The second pic is my servo fittings with the old Prestolite starter installed, which is quite a bit bigger than the Sky-Tec.

And a really good museum right on the field, too, if you have a few hours.

Paywalled.

Not sure what's going on there, but I didn't have that issue. I think mine is not an EC, though, whether or not that matters.

My governor had an odd leak where it leaked from the control input shaft, that the prop cable connects to. It apparently only leaked at certain positions, since it didn't always do it. I only figured that out because the governor failed and the prop shop saw it when they were testing it. The leak went away with the new governor, so that fixed it. Weepy oil leaks can be hard to find. You can try tricks like putting talcum or baby powder around the area and see where it's not dry, or putting fluorescent dye in the oil (which is harmless) and a UV lamp to find the oil. I've not had great success with the dye, but others have. Everything needs to be pretty clean to start with for either of those to work well.

Totally normal and common. There've been a few threads about this in the past as well.

That would make sense for one to be hardened and one not, and it'd make sense for the gear to be the soft one since it is easier to replace in the assembly. That doesn't match the failure wear patterns that've been shown, though, where the worm wears and the gear seems fine. For the load, I think if you spec'ed from max torque of the motor and then counted the number of output turns in a gear-up or gear-down cycle, plus the usual 6-second travel time for the cycle, you'd know a lot about the required load. Even though the load is supposed to be greater going up, the cycle times don't seem much different. Maybe we should start putting stop watches on the airborne gear cycles to see if it matters.

If it's been consistent there's probably just a little more wear to happen to fully seat the rings, since it only has 48 hours on it. I'd suggest just flying it the way you want to fly it and see what it does. If it doesn't get worse, you're golden, as it'll probably just get a bit better with time. And, yes, 5-8 hours/qt is pretty typical for 4-cyl Lycomings. The ones that do better are exceptional, and 15-20 hrs/qt is especially exceptional. That's low enough I'd be worried about something being too weird in there.

+1 that if you just need a surface hardness test, that's within the capability of many shops. Probably a lot cheaper, too. There may be an aerospace machine shop in your area that is well equipped. Since a vendor that already knows how to make them has been identified, instead of reverse engineering the materials of the existing ones it may be easier to just spec the dimensional requirements and load (from the motor torque and operational duration), plus expected cycle life, etc., and just have the vendor sort out how to meet the requirements. With suitable hints they may internally say, hey, we have a design that will meet that that can be slightly tweaked or sold as-is, etc. That's a pretty normal thing to happen. You might wind up with a gear set that's better than the originals.

That's not bad, especially if it's consistent. I think it took mine a hundred hours or two before it settled down. It's been 6-7 hours/qt since then, which is pretty typical, so you're not far off.

They don't put out as much power as the primary alternator, so the expectation is that you may have to shed load down to what it can support, or you'll be draining the battery to meet the excess.

NIce. There's an Air Disaster episode of a NOAA Poseidon aircraft that lost an engine while penetrating Hurricane Hugo in 1989, and wound up in the eye unable to hold altitude and dealing with a partially disintegrated airplane. It's a great story, but my favorite part was there was an Air Force C-130 in there, too, and they were able to come alongside and help survey the external damage to the aircraft. Jeebuz, but I'd have definitely loved work like that when I was younger. Full ep can be seen here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P_E00cmcMWY

They're not infallible, either, but seem to be more careful and more amenable to being helpful when things do come out suboptimally. Definitely a good option when practical. A long-time Mooney owner based here in Phoenix takes his airplane there for annuals.

Same with metars. Obfuscate the information as much as possible so that the 1200 baud teletype machines can keep up, which stopped being a problem more than forty years ago. It's dumb, imho.

The only time I've had much trouble with a hot start was at high DA on a hot day. Took forever, but did finally start and stay running. Otherwise the usual advice in the thread applies. After a while it gets pretty routine.