Pasturepilot

Leaf blower. Easiest way to sweep a hangar in seconds. Not my hangar, I just play there and take notes for my someday hangar.

Thanks, Cody. Great information here. Gonna be getting lined up for a balance tomorrow. Between having had the prop off for a new alternator belt and crankshaft seal, new isolator mounts, and shimming the thrust line up, it’s time. Not to mention that I have a wedge of foam in my compass mount to keep it from dancing.

Crap. No, it’s not counterweighted. Cant believe I let the guy send me down that rabbit hole! thanks for pointing that out.

He never did elaborate.

I reached out to a local group of pilots on Facebook to see if anyone had a contact for dynamic propeller balancing. Got several names and phone numbers... and one surprising reply. One opined that he would never do a dynamic balance on a counter weighted engine after it had more than a few hundred hours on it. I’m at 1100 hours on my engine. I know it was dynamically balanced 20 years ago, when we had a guy hanging around our air show group and he’d balance everyone on the strip when he came out for a work day. Then, the prop got changed a few years back to eliminate the monster AD, and hasn’t been balanced since. I’ve since changed and shimmed the engine mounts, and had the prop off to change an alternator belt. My logic says now is the time for a balance job. Is this the one old wives’ tale that I missed somewhere along the way, or is there merit to his statement? I can see his logic... but it sounds a bit fuzzy to me.

The one's I'm talking about have an integral fire sleeve, and a slightly smaller outer diameter, if I'm reading correctly. https://specialtyhose.com/index_htm_files/Brown Silicone Firesleeve Hose eng bulletin.pdf

That’s my understanding. And looks like a slightly more compact profile than the rubber hoses with a fire sleeve. A little space freed up FWF might be nice!

Crap, I forgot about Gann. I can drive to his shop!

Anyone ever try a paintless dent remover kit from Amazon? I doubt it'd remove the dent altogether but might minimize the need for filler.

Well, it's annual season at the hangar which means I'm 18 days into having my airplane as far apart as she's been in the 25 years I've known her. My IA came out yesterday and started checking the boxes on the checklist as he followed up on my wrench work. He dug through the logbooks as I was wrestling with something or the other. "How old are these oil cooler lines?" Uh, let's see. Pretty sure I changed them. "Well it's your handwriting in here that says you fire-sleeved them and installed them... 17 years ago." Holy moly, time flies. They're the old style rubber hoses with separate fire sleeves. I'm debating pulling the trigger to install "forever hoses" on my "forever plane." Question for those who have: Do the newfangled PTFE hoses (the brown hoses in case my verbiage isn't correct) fit an M20C? My specific concerns are the oil cooler lines where they attach to the accessory housing, and the sweeping 180 turn for one fuel line that connects to the fuel flow transducer that's mounted to the left footwell. I'll be sending a few quote emails to Heber and PHT. Has anyone had any luck with a Parker Store? There's one less than a mile off the route to the hangar. Thanks.

I just did this with mine using the quarter trick. Get a big pocketful of quarters (or thick washers) and open the inspection panel outboard of the gear. Insert coins between the coils of the spring, and have someone unlock the gear. As it retracts, the spring would normally compress but the coins block that and it’ll fall totally slack. easy, peasy. A tip: count the coins you use. My springs have decades of LPS3, corrosionX and dust coating them so the coins didn’t fall out freely when I put it all back together. Some stuck in the spring, and were difficult to see. I stuck a screwdriver blade or ratchet extension into the center of the spring and was surprised when I kept hitting coins I couldn’t see.

Last night, Amy went to get the mail while I was fixing dinner. She comes walking in and said "You've got a letter from someone in Denton, Texas. The envelope says "*Additional information 46Q." I got fan mail. I called Paul and we spent 40 minutes telling tales. His father may be the perfect embodiment of the American Dream. You see, Roswell Mathis dropped out of school in the 9th grade. His father died, and he had to tend the family farm. Eventually he upgraded to driving a milk route, and from there he wound up driving a city bus in Jacksonville, Florida. He saved his pennies whenever he could, but when the barnstormers came to town, a friend talked him into shelling out a few bucks for an airplane ride. Yeah, the bug bit.. Hard. Roswell took flying lessons, knocked out his tickets, and when World War Two rolled around, he instructed Navy pilots as a civilian. "My dad really wanted to go fight, but the navy wouldn't have it. They explained that he wasn't easily replaceable. He'd have to start from zero as a military pilot, and as he progressed, the navy would have to find a civilian instructor to take his place. So he instructed his way through the war." After the war, he hired on at Eastern Air Lines, starting on the DC-3 and flying until he turned 60 in 1974. Not bad for someone who didn't finish their freshman year of high school. His son had googled the tail numbers of airplanes his father had owned, and my story popped up. The plane is registered in my name, at my home address. The crumbs were easy enough to follow. He recounted tales of flying around in the Mooney - he remembered flying with his dad while Disney World was under construction, then again once it was finished but not yet open to the public. The theme park had a soft opening for locals, and they flew along I-4, eyeballing the traffic backing up for miles. The apple hadn't fallen far from the tree. Paul flew F-4s in the Air Force and went on to a career at Southwest that he recently retired from. We told Mooney stories, I listened to war stories, and we talked a lot about aviation books–we're both book nerds as it turned out.

I saw the shortage at Spruce, but my neighborhood Falconcrest had some on the shelf. I grabbed a tube there about two weeks ago.

I have a rolling cart of heavy metal (lead? depleted uranium?) weights I inherited with the plane. They’re juuust enough weight at the tie down. I usually throw a case of oil and a couple old batteries in the baggage bin for good measure. Not as effective as if they were back at the tail tie down, but it spreads the stress a little.

An update: the $100 eBay unit works beautifully. took the airport kid for a hop across Alabama today to try it out. It’s not the new Gee-whiz gadget, but it works(For now). I’m happy.

Spoke to Don Valentine yesterday. He says there are no parts for a fix, that it’s done. Dead. It was a low end model to begin with, and the right, legal, parts just don’t exist for the repair. Found a unit on eBay that’s got a money back guarantee if it does not work. Figured that’s worth a gamble. The takeaway: if you have a WX-900 that’s working, speak kindly to it and treat it with kid gloves.

Thanks, y'all. Yeah, with a lot of light shining on the screen, you can see it working, so I'm pretty sure it's just the backlight. I like the idea of having some self-sufficient, realtime weather information. I'll reach out to Don Valentine and see what he says about getting it fixed. Granted, the WX-900 won't talk to other screens, as far as I know, but it's better than eyeballing a cloud and hoping for the best. I do a lot of weather flying in the Airbus and having 200,000 of airplane around me, onboard radar, WIFI weather, and two sets of qualified eyeballs with experience is a little different than scooting around the southeast with 180 horsepower and an iPad. I'd like to get airborne for some Mooney IFR, but I've still got a few projects I want to do before I start doing real IFR. But we're getting there. Again, thanks for the input.

Friends, Way over on the right side of my panel, there's an old BFG WX-900 strike finder. The backlighting is out - the Indiglo backlight on a $20 timex might be longer lasting. I'm on the fence whether I want to have it fixed, or try and gain a pound and a half of useful load back. Arguments for fixing it: An onboard, self-sustained weather source that is very relevant in the southeast where convective activity is King. Real-time reporting that keeps on going if my ADS-B link hiccups. Arguments against the fix: It's not a sure thing. Some percentage of fixes fail to work. If the repair works, it's still an old piece of instrumentation. I can, in theory, get the same data from Foreflight if I don't mind the lag. Best I can tell, there's only one guy who repairs WX-900s anymore: Keith Peshak, who advertises on Barnstormers. It's a $500 fix, plus shipping. Has anyone had one fixed? Happy with the decision? Lemme know. I've gotta make a decision.. but not in a great hurry. There are some advertised on flea-bay touted as operable... it'd be cheaper than the repair, but I figure that's just a ticking clock until the backlight goes on that one as well. Penny for y'all's thoughts.

Years ago I was trying to start a hopped up IO-360 in an aerobatic bird to taxi it shortly after the performer had flown his routine. I was getting nowhere, fast. The pilot walked over and uttered some fateful words: "When in doubt, flood it out." At least then, you know what you're dealing with. It's served me well in a lot of types that I didn't fly long enough to build aircraft-specific knowledge in. Also, if you start seeing any sort of starting issue regularly, it might be time to take a long, hard look at your ignition system. That's where it often first starts showing age. A weak spark amplifies any other issues at startup.

If you're the same person who had made multiple requests for this on several forums... I'm glad one popped up to try on! I felt bad as the first time I saw someone post this request in the Omaha area was right after passing through on the way home after our trip out west. The elbow room thing is a little awkward with a friend, but with Amy in the right seat, I just use her leg as an armrest. It works.

Great stuff! Thanks for sharing.

I have a ‘65 M20C. She’s been circulated among my close friends since 1980, and there’s no small amount of emotional attachment involved. I’ll admit that up front even though for years I’ve counseled others to avoid exactly that when I did their pre-purchase inspections. What I bought as a solid flyer is, in actuality, a flying project. It’s solid enough that we took it out west last summer, but needy enough that I‘ve had every bit of the main gear apart in the last week for some TLC, and am waiting on a downlock block from LASAR. I clicked like on the suggestion that if you want a project, look at a home built. A couple reasons for that: - If you’re not an A&P, you’ll need one really handy for the Mooney project. If you build the RV, at the end of the process you can get your repairman certificate for that bird and have just as much legal authority as the A&P would. - experimental amateur built birds aren’t beholden to expenses such as PMA parts, STCs, and our occasionally challenging limited parts supply in the Mooney world. I’d like to re-bush my entire main gear right now. new parts to accomplish that goal are turning out to be a challenge to locate. If it was a home built, I’d be turning down stock on a lathe right now. -homebuilts have cheaper and often more-capable options available. - and at the end of the day, you’ll have an early Mooney that most folks would offer 30-40K for a purchase price even if you wind up with 60k in it. The resale value reflects what the market will support more so than what you’ve put into it. -you can remove an RV’s fuel tanks and ship them to someone who knows what they’re doing for sealing or re-seal. I say all that to say this. I’m enjoying the daylights out of my flying project. The airplane is rugged (nose gear steering excepted), simple-ish, and while it ain’t the easiest thing to work on, there are few impossible tasks. Spar corrosion seems to be the big killer, so make certain you look at every inch of that structure before you commit to buying the B project. We as a community love to know another airframe might return to the sky, but sometimes we’ve got to accept that some serial numbers are best utilized as a trove of spare parts. Good luck, whichever choice you make.

Thanks, Andy. Used this last week for the right main, and will do the left main this week. That was a big help.

Thanks for this. I just woke up and grabbed the big bundle of Mooney docs in something of a panic. I didn't post about it but basically I went all in, and pulled the right main gear assembly when I went to replace the shock mounts. There was a good bit of surface rust where the truss had been spray painted in-situ over the years but the top of the top tube hadn't been touched. I cleaned it all up and put it all back together with my new discs this weekend. I didn't want all that work to be in vain! Looks like the nose gear had the SB performed in November, 1984. I hadn't figured out when the main was officially done, but in digging through the pile of stuff, there was a January 1996 MAPA Log issue in a folder labeled maintenance. What the heck? It is folded open permanently to a LASAR advertisement and penciled in the margins there's a series of notes from a phone call with Bill at LASAR, with part names and prices of the spacers and links for the main gear. Sure enough, I flipped to January '96 and worked forward. New main gear shock mounts and spacers in April, 1997. So my freshly cleaned and painted gear is up to speed on the SB. I think I'll go start on the left main gear now. On that note, any Mooney guys around ATL have the gear rigging tools I can beg, borrow, rent or steal for a few days?

3-68 is the entirety of the number string, separate from the much longer part number. I‘m guessing they got changed at some point with new (very) old stock. The record keeping from owners past is a bit spotty..