0TreeLemur

Our first annual update. There are two issues that my A&P is investigating. First, rudder motion is about 1/2" side to side with feet on the pedals. He says that it should be no more than 1/8". Looking for warn rod ends. Second, right landing gear seems to be out of rigging- when gear are full up, it is short of touching upper limit of wheel well by about 1/2 inch, which coincides with an approximately 1/2" gap on the gear door. Left main gear is full up. We'll try adjusting tomorrow. Long day, but hugely interesting for us! I find it seriously incredible the amount of "stuff" that happens in that 4" deep space below your feet in the M20. And that the aluminum floor is 0.032" thick. Oh- installed LED indicator light in parallel with fuel pump. That is cool.

Yesterday I was using a diamond tipped Phillips driver. Put enough torque on the heads pushing up from the crawler to start to fail the heads. I tried some penetrating oil with PTFE and tried again after an hour or so, to no effect. They are stuck.

I'm going to sick Big Dave the A&P on it tomorrow morning and see how he does it.

We just ended a long day of screw/panel removal. There are 3 stuck screws with partially stripped heads that will wait for A&P to deal with on Tuesday. Fun day in a brightly lit hangar. We are both tired. Thanks everyone for the input! We're looking forward to Tuesday when the fun barrier is broken!

My diabolical plan is to get the plane outdoors, in the clouds and rain, as soon as this annual is complete and I finish my IR. @carusoam when you say "Fogging" is that via aerosol can or something more complex like an actual atomizer?

@Boilermonkey I have not heard of corrosionX before. Sounds like a good product. I"ll order a couple of cans. Thx.

Thanks Clarence. The same A&P did the annual last year has some software that prints out applicable ADs based on model and S/N. He went through all the logs last year. It will be interesting to see how he follows up.

Thanks -a-. I was hoping for one of your lists. In a past life I was a farmer who did things like swap out a hydrostatic transmission from a swather in the middle of an alfalfa field. My co-pilot will be helping me tomorrow. She has skills- she replaced all the circuit breakers in our plane back in May.

My A&P is going to start doing the annual on my '67C on Tuesday. I've downloaded and printed the Mooney 100h/annual inspection checklist and have been studying the maintenance manual. He said I could get started by taking off inspection panels for him. I observed the annual last year as part of the pre-buy, but I didn't really participate to a degree that I remember much detail about what was done when/why. I've got some questions: Must all the inspection panels beneath the wings be removed or just some? I know not to take the ones off that are below the fuel tanks. My a/c does not have a 1 piece belly, I presume that all those panels must be removed between the wings? The empennage access panel comes off, as do the gap seals where the tail rotates in response to trim. What else? Surely one of you long-time C owners can give me some marching orders so my co-pilot and I can productively spend our Sunday helping get ready for the big inspection. Any hints on how to keep stuff organized so reassembly is made easier? Any warnings about things _not_ to do? Should I take the cowl off yet, or should I wait until after we warm it up to do the compression test? Will the engine warm up faster or slower with the cowl off? I'm full of questions. Thanks in advance for any advice. It looks like very nice day tomorrow in the 60's and I'm looking forward to spending some quality time in the hangar learning more about our Mooney.

Some CB's overhaul them for a lot less... An AC/Delco 0-30 Ohm sender from a 1934-1946 GM pickup truck with a lengthened float lever is what Mooney used in the original M20 smaller (<=26 gal.) tanks.

Before we changed to the JPI the fuel needles did bounce a lot when the fuel was sloshing in the tanks due to turbulence. When the floats were steady, the readings were steady. I think you nailed it they needed some damping. The JPI does that. BTW, installing any contemporary engine monitor is pretty straightforward. If you install one that can be primary like the JPI900, you can get rid of a bunch of steam gauges, plus get the oil and fuel lines out of your cockpit. We removed: tach, MP/FP, carb temp, and the entire six-gauge cluster containing L/R Fuel, CHT, Oil Temp, Oil Press, and Amps, because they are all primary on the JPI. Now all that info is located in one display, including 4 CHT and 4 EGTs. I highly recommend it. It is probably the best bank for the buck you can install in your Mooney. I seldom get the "fuel mismatch error" described by @Marauder

This "discovery" is academic hubris at its best. My point is this: there really isn't much too it, and electric field ionic propulsion isn't practical except maybe for a light weight silent drone flying in a low-wind environment. Ionic propulsion in the atmosphere is grossly inefficient because it relies on collisions between ions accelerated in an electric field and non-ionized species in the gas to produce thrust. Some of those collisions accelerate air in directions that don't contribute to the direction of thrust! The ion acceleration is limited by the electrical breakdown of air that decreases with altitude. If they were testing it with a higher field strength at takeoff, their electric field would break down the air and create an arc. Ever seen an ionic fan for sale? Nope. At higher field strengths below breakdown the ions can create NOx and O3, both of which are not particularly good for your health. Read this for grins & giggles and you'll see what I mean: http://www.airpurifierguide.org/faq/what-happened-to-ionic-breeze

And, as the professor in the video says, the electric field strength is limited by the breakdown of the air. What's that smell??? DARPA funds for silent drone research!

You've intrigued me. I dove in to see what we are really talking about here. Here is a video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=boB6qu5dcCw&amp;feature=youtu.be Their aircraft has the mass of a big chicken, with a 3 m wingspan. The data in the paper show input power of 600W to propel the 2.5 kg craft at about 4 m/s. That is a specific impulse based on craft mass of 0.0167 s. My C uses an output shaft power of 95500 W to propel my 1022 kg craft at 72 m/s, a specific impulse based on craft mass of 0.7628 s. So, my 1967 C is 4500% more efficient at converting energy into mass aloft with forward motion. So it makes a little noise and burns some smelly 'ol petrol. Still waiting on lead-free biofuel.

We put the JPI900 in our '67C earlier this year. The old float gauges were retained. The fuel level readings are stable and within 1 gallon compared to the in-tank dial gauges. It seems that the JPI does include some averaging circuitry. The indicated fuel levels vary a bit when you power up the JPI but after a while they are really constant. That is what makes me think that they probably do some averaging in the JPI. Fred

I have a Sensorcon clipped to the old microphone hangar by the door. -Fred

Dear Editor/Site Manager, I suggest that old threads and posts that are older than some age (e.g. 24 calendar months) since writing be somehow denoted. For instance, they could be given a slightly colored background. Something to denote that they contain information that might be old and dated. Perhaps a tag added to the title **> 2 years old**. The present scheme treats all articles as equal. Because of changes in regulations, technology, equipment/software upgrades, older articles should be taken with a grain of salt in some topical areas, not all. Having a slightly different background color for older articles will help readers recognize that caution in interpretation may be warranted because some of the info they are reading might be out of date, or just wrong (isn't that always the case??). It will help with reader awareness and increase the value of the information on these pages. Now, I'll gladly admit that with my 51 year old aircraft, state-of-the-art is ancient. But a lot has changed even in the past few years. IN the past year since joining this site I"ve started to keep my eye on the recent posts sidebar. Sometimes it takes me to a recent post on a thread started 10 years ago! Or- members add comments to a thread that turns out to have been started 10 years ago. I believe that contemporary threads are more valuable than old threads. Threads with a 4 or 6 year gap between posts are not unusual. Sometimes the original posting and those older follow ups contain useful info. I'm not saying we should delete those threads. I'm saying that we should warn users that they are reading an old thread, and they might want to create a new one rather than revive a zombie. Do with this what you will. I don't expect a reply or to have started a debate. Thanks. -Fred

But- priming/painting. Doesn't somebody who did the 201 windshield upgrade just have these laying around? That's my question.

He did the tanks on my C in Oct. 2018. Seems like the quality of his work has been high for years. I was impressed with the work.

I too agree that this sounds like a fuel leak near or into the cabin. When we fly our Mooney's, the cabin is actually at a pressure slightly less than ambient. After takeoff, the evaporation of fuel pooled near the wing root or thereabouts with vapors being pulled into the cabin is my guess. The fuel is leaking from sender gasket, leaky tank sealant or both. My aircraft just had its tanks resealed and fuel level sender gaskets replaced- and the avgas smell is gone. Now it just smells like "Old Airplane". Good luck.

Wicked Mooney M20C wing-tip vortex! Evening/night flight to try out the upgraded NAV lights. Seen flying from TCL-EET off the right wing. Taken by my copilot.

Here is a photo showing the problem with the instrument bay cover panel on my aircraft. It is not pretty, but still works. Some of the nut plates are very nearly stripped out and need replacement. We now use nylon washers. Does anyone have panels in better shape, ideally countersunk like @Yetti

found a couple. Thanks @Yetti

Personal preference, but I find blue light to be really annoying at night. I have no orange annunciator lights, that's why I picked that color.

Status update: I received the NOS Grimes bases that I bought on eBay, and I made up a new nav lights using colored LED bulbs with clear lenses. The old lenses were actually glass, and stuck on like crazy with silicone. I had to break them to get them off! The old bulbs where LED, but white with a high color temperature. For that reason the "green" bulb on the right wing actually gave off more of a blue light, and dim at that. The new lenses use gaskets not silicone and are held in place by the teardrop metal fairing that serves to streamline the fixture and make them forward-style nav lights. They look great. Took them on a night flight last night and they cast big green and red lobes on the ground around the wingtips while taxiing. They also illuminate reflective objects some distance in the way. Photo shows new red bulb in left wing, which is the dim one, in the hangar after I installed it with skylight illumination in daytime. Note all the light on the floor. I'm pleasantly pleased with how it turned out. I'm going to sell the original grimes bases back on eBay, hopefully for about what I paid for the NOS ones.