EricJ

A fine testament to my lack of reading skills.

Can't sell the parts, but you can sell the data to the people who need to make the parts. If a shop gets a reputation for making the parts well, I don't think there's anything stopping multiple people from sending the exact same data and asking for the exact same part to be built. Or have a piece of billet material drop shipped to a shop that already has the data and ask for the part to be made out of that. There are a lot of ways it can be done and be compliant with the rules.

You're not going to go back and look for the one that fell off?

Andrew, a lot of info is in Special Letter 92-1 and SB M20-252. You can get them both in one file here: http://www.mooney201.de/files/SL92-1_SN24_1686-2999.pdf For many of the later S/Ns there is also a check and possible modification of the rudder balance weight, and a change in the airspeed indicator.

Windmills aren't that bad, but they're not great, either. As an engineer I still think nuclear is ultimately the way to go.

Many tablets will as well, and the $20 GPS receiver plugged into my Stratux also receives GLONASS, Beidou, Galileo, etc. The likelihood of them all being down is pretty low, and if they were there may not be a place to land, anyway.

If it's just a leak and can be patched, which most leaks can, it can be likely be done for less than $1k. Maxwell's shop in Longview, TX, successfully patched mine for $600 a few years ago.

I don't, but I've never worried about accidentally going a little over gross because of it.

There are many presentations and ACs from the FAA on how to do this. It isn't that hard, and you don't need factory drawings. The whole idea is to keep the fleet flying in the face of factory closures or excessive end-of-life pricing or just excessive lead times. All of those things have been cited by the FAA as reasons for an owner to produce a part. In other words, even if the factory is open and producing parts, if they're too expensive or take too long to get, as far as the FAA is concerned those are legitimate reasons to make your own. This has been discussed much here or you can do a web search on something like "FAA owner produced parts" and get more info.

The application demographic seems to be fairly narrow, too: people who want "glass" to go in a spot where a steam gauge was without altering the physical mount or appearance of the panel. The corners of the displays that they cut off on these is really useful space. e.g., the G5 displays things like groundspeed, distance to next waypoint, etc., in those corners where they're really useful, but out of the way. On these it just seems to clutter everything up more than necessary, for the sole utility of not altering the "roundness" of the existing panel location. It seems like a weird retro-mod niche. It's certainly not forward-looking for panel display technology. Have to say I don't get it, other than for that particular niche of users.

Maintenance you do by yourself under the "preventative maintenance" rules, e.g., oil changes, you should log as the owner/pilot.

FWIW, I'm in A&P school right now and that's how it's been conveyed here, i.e., the signature on the annual only attests to its condition and airworthiness at that moment. Once it leaves your custody you have no control or visibility into what may or may not happen to it that affects its condition. I don't think the concern is as much with the buyer as it is with the buyer's heirs should something bad happen.

I think other than the $2500 price tag, that's all there. Anything that will interface with a GNS 530/430 will interface with the Avidyne units. My G5 and my Trig TT31 are driven by my IFD.

Actually I think only a BATD is required, but it doesn't change much. They're still more expensive than most people would be comfortable with for home use. I've thought that this would be an opportunity for somebody to set up a shop with a few BATDs/AATDs and just rent time on them for people wanting to keep IFR current. Some training time of how to use the device would be necessary, but that do-able.

Owner Produced Parts are 100% legal if the requirements are met. I don't know how an insurance company could exclude that unless they have language in the policy saying that they could, which is something you could figure out by reading your policy.