0TreeLemur

Hi @ZuluZulu I had LASIK for on my 40th birthday in 2004, for my 40th birthday present, and haven't looked back. Of course when I turned fifty-ish I had to get reading glasses. Nothing related to distance vision improvement is going to change that. Go for it. My distance vision is still 20/15 and 20/25. In the past I've done a lot of field work in tropical settings. That is why I really wanted to get rid of glasses- they always fog up in the jungle. My eye dr. just told me "Don't get stuck in the eye by a stick", which I successfully avoided- not for the lack of trying... The eye flap from LASIK can be lifted/torn by sharp impact to the eye of the kind that would probably not do a normal eye any good. Good luck.

@Andy95W you just used the past tense to describe something that does not yet exist...

Thanks @carusoam I'll look at the center of that plastic shaft- I suspect you are correct- it feels different in the middle. Replacing the switch is most certainly the way to go it seems. On a related note- I luckily had my headset on when this big honkin' thing fell off the ceiling and hit me in the head. This knob extends/retracts the dorsal air inlet, and is machined out of a 1" thick piece of solid aluminum. Pretty heavy for what it does. I'm starting to look hard at how to improve the interior... It looks pretty tired.

Does anyone else have the rotary style switch? If so, please tell me how far the shaft protrudes down from the fixture? Oddly it doesn't seem that this is broken, rather it looks like it was intentionally made too short... I'll take the plastic headliner down and see about installing a replacement, or retrofitting with a pwm dimmer as @carusoam suggested.

The dome light switch in our '67C is the type that you rotate between thumb and forefinger to turn the light on/off. As you rotate it about 1/2 turn it clicks. As shown in the photo, the switch is too short. It does not protrude beyond the fixture so is impossible to use. I took the fixture off yesterday for a look, and the tip of the switch shaft is rounded and smooth, as if it were made that way. Now I know that this cannot be the case. The shaft seems to be made of plastic, and is about 1/4" dia. Has anyone (1) had this problem and (2) come up with an elegant fix? Of course, I would like to extend the shaft 1/2 and make it a target for a passenger to hit their head on Other options will be considered. Please no hijacking this thread to discuss Star Trek "Force Fieldz" and "Tractor Beamz".

That's a crazy idea that conjures up some vivid mental imagery. I could see Bill Murray involvement. There are better and less dangerous ways that don't involve somebody with a hose in the back of a pickup truck spraying large drops of water into sub-freezing air while being chased by a spinning meat grinder. There are several icing wind tunnels in the US- that would be a great place to do some controlled testing. Demonstrating durability for products with environmental exposure is a very challenging task because of the huge variety of conditions our aircraft operate in other than icing conditions. What about bug splats, sand hits, super hot hangars, UV exposure, humidity, condensation, frost, dust, raindrop impact at high speed, washing, detergents,... I guess I would want to know a lot more about the environmental durability of this stuff before trusting my life to it. Often with claims of durability are true with regard to one or two environmental factors, combinations of more of them usually result in steep declines in product durability. It's a fascinating problem.

That is a fantastic story Erik. Given the thin aluminum skin between crew and hot lead and the extremely cold temperatures, I can easily imagine that WWII bomber missions could extinguish the love of flight pretty quickly. Two of my uncles were WWII pilots and I was honored to take them both up different times in a rented Skyhawk back in the 1980's, which they probably thought was pretty quaint after flying B-24's over the hump loaded with gasoline and torpedo bombers off carriers.

There are fewer than 500,000 U.S. WWII veterans still with us. Here is an article that is very touching about one of those veterans and how a German researcher sent him back some bits of his B-24 with a note. This is one hell of an aviation-related read. https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/military/sd-me-found-plane-20190114-story.html

As an owner of one of @KLRDMD's former aircraft, I agree. He knows how to pick them.

@jetdriven from your photos it looks like you put vent windows in both sides. Just curious why did you decide to go with 1/4" instead of 3/16" and save the hassle of all that milling?

I keep my eye out for interesting and applicable scientific breakthroughs. Here's a candidate: Some researchers at the University of Houston have developed a polymer coating that ice doesn't adhere to. That isn't unusual, ice doesn't stick well to a lot of organic materials. Here's the big deal- you spray it on, and according to the demo in the online article, the effect persists for years. If it does that, isn't toxic, and doesn't damage paint, I want some! If it does damage paint, I want my a/c painted with it. Spray on passive deice boots! See online article here https://phys.org/news/2019-01-breakthrough-ice-repelling-materials.html

The NASA competition this century for a heavy launch vehicle led Rocketdyne to estimate how to re-fabricate the F1 engine using contemporary construction practices. To do that, they took one out of the freezer and disassembled it. The originals required several person-years of labor to construct each engine, and today most of the manufacturing would be done using automated techniques. They did build and test a 'gas generator' which is a huge turbine that runs the fuel land oxidizer pumps. That worked- see video on Youtube. Now, according to what I've read on AVWeb, Mooney is way and above the most labor-intensive production certified light single aircraft today. Something like 40% more person-hours of the next large competitor. @steingar reported above that when Mooney re-started production, they brought workers out of retirement to show them how to build Mooney's. Maybe they would have done themselves a favor if instead of bringing back the old way, they went out and hired some recent graduates in engineering and mechatronics. and maybe pilfered a few experienced manufacturing folks from the automotive industry. I could be a consultant...

Na gah do it. Returning to eBay seller as inop. Tested in a second machine. Same problem. Won't show post. It's dead.

I think we need another feedback category, and this would win it- a little emoticon of a trophy for making an award-quality contribution.

@Michael thanks for looking into your setup. I tried running the stock 172SP that comes with XP-11 and it still causes my machine to chug along at about 10 fps. The "new" graphics card I bought on ebay arrived today. GXT 970. Removed the nVidia 730 and plugged it in eagerly. Booted to VGA bios and told me to plug in the PCI-E power cables. Did that. Of course it doesn't seem to work right. I get mobo beep code saying problem with graphics card. Funny thing is, when I have no discrete GPU installed in the PCI-E slot, the onboard vga doesn't work, and I get the same beep code. The only thing that will work is the 730. Bios is ok. Card is compatible with my mobo according to several posts. My PS is big enough according to recommended by nVidia. Can't for the life of me figure this one out- played around with bios vga settings. Uninstalled nVidia driver from Win10 and rebooted with new card in, still get the mobo beep code for graphics card error. Funny thing is, after that error beep code, in all cases, it seems to boot, I just don't get anything on my screen. Sigh. I guess reflash the bios is next. I don't want to do that... -Fred

Cool. We didn't have one of those.

When the gov. in our C acted up in mid 2018, my A&P removed the left magneto which made access to the gov. much easier. It came right off after removing the left mag., oil filter, and vacuum pump vent. He had to sacrifice the box end of a wrench and do some grinding to get the 1/2" (IIRC) open end wrench to fit. When he replaced it with the PCU5000, the engine studs had to be swapped out because the PCU5000 has a thicker base plate. I helped with that- what a pain. It finally took triple-nutting the existing studs to get them out and to put the new ones in. <read the instructions first>. YMMV. PPSEL advice only, not an A&P. Good luck.

No problems after 10 months and about 100 h on the JPI 900. Lovin' it.

I'm glad you asked. That is a Turbo Encabulator. https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&amp;rct=j&amp;q=&amp;esrc=s&amp;source=web&amp;cd=1&amp;cad=rja&amp;uact=8&amp;ved=2ahUKEwjv1L-HkfHfAhXwRt8KHbC7BwYQwqsBMAB6BAgDEAQ&amp;url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DAc7G7xOG2Ag&amp;usg=AOvVaw2fgJikev-sbCrgwuvTTX_N

-a- Maybe your Mooney. Those are the really close to the ASI arcs for a pre-68 C.

Thanks- I am guessing that the issue with lack of ability to get the inner knob on the radios or xpdr to turn is related to latency caused by my slow graphix card. The program has multiple problems when it is waiting on rendering it seems.

Au contraire- despite your proclaimed status as a lowly PP, you seem to have an almost otherworldly grasp of organic chemistry- and I'm talking about the butyl rubber membranes on the Brittain PC system vacuum servos, not electrical components. Will the corrosionX begin to immediately dissolve the rubber? If so, then what can be done to stop it? Hypothetically of course.

So, @carusoam let me ask a <hypothetical> question of you. If a relatively new M20C owner during the recent annual inspection of his aircraft fumigated the wing and tail with corrosionX and didn't bag up the rubber membranes on the vacuum servos, are they going to (a) disintegrate quickly, (b) disintegrate slowly, or (c) spontaneously combust? What is the remedy?

@Marauder I value your aviation-related contributions to this forum, but for GOD SAKE we don't need this. Pleeeeze stop. You can use the little "options" thing to delete that.