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A64Pilot

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Everything posted by A64Pilot

  1. It’s easy to fab a part, but to install it you need some kind of authorization, like a factory drawing. I assume there is one?
  2. What is a Vonlane Bus? Its way cheaper to fly my Mooney fuel wise than drive my Motorhome. In fact so far the Mooney has been WAY cheaper than the Motorhome. I just looked it up, if it was going where I needed to I think I might take that Bus, I certainly would over Commercial flying
  3. Fiberglass is real easy, fire wise it’s a different resin, I don’t think there is an additive, but there may be. Ideally in my opinion use Epoxy it’s worth the little bit of extra money, only downside of Epoxy is you can’t Gelcoat it, but you don’t airplane parts anyway. A boat guy can do a better job for much less money, it’s what they do every day.
  4. Years ago when I did my seaplane rating Brown’s hand props from behind, because they are float planes and that’s about the only way, stand on the right float. Students aren’t allowed to hand prop Neighbor has a glider hook on his Baby Ace, but it’s an Experimental, it may not be as easy to put one on a Cub, but maybe as it’s a safety issue you might could, because there may not be an STC for a 65 HP Cub Dr Ralph Kimberlin my fixed wing test pilot mentor has an airplane with an STC that uses a Dewalt drill for a starter, looks Rube Goldberg, but it works
  5. I don’t know who she is. I’ve hand propped aircraft of course but have an ingrained fear of doing so. I’ve only done it with both wings tied down myself, and chocked. Always seemed dangerous to me, largely from the idea of the prop eating me. I’m an old helicopter pilot, the tail rotor has always made me nervous too. When I was in flight school an instructor walked into one at night. I didn’t see it but heard it was bad, wasn’t much left above the waist. Neighbor had her Hatz Biplane get away from her, pulled the dog tie down out of the ground. Luckily a ditch stopped it because it was headed for her neighbors house, totaled the Hatz.
  6. I was driving by the airport and saw an ambulance and fire truck at the FBO. However no one was hurt? No fuel spill etc. I didn’t stop, saw the 182 this morning on our breakfast run. Line kid told me the story of what happened. Cub got it about as bad as the 182, both got prop strikes, damaged wings and required prop strike inspections and condemned props I’m sure.
  7. They bite. Last Thursday a young guy as in late teens was hand propping his Cub. I assume his Cub and I brought up his age because most times it’s old men with Cubs, seems that way anyway. But anyway he had one wheel chocked and the Cub got away from him, and the old 182 paid the price. Crystal River Fl. Not a Mooney, and I don’t have any idea how you can keep this kind of exceedingly rare event from happening to you, but it seems lately there have been several taxiing into other aircraft and other very improbable accidents?
  8. Lapping is a band aid, it can make a difference if there is carbon build up etc.that causes the leak as it will remove carbon, but that’s something that comes and goes from one day to the next. It’s like ring flushes, you’re clearing the fault maybe but haven’t corrected the condition that caused it. However for people that fly infrequently getting another 50 hours before the problem re-occurs may give you another year, or if your selling may get it past the pre-buy. Often “staking” a valve can remove the carbon and raise compression, but be careful staking done incorrectly it can cause damage, but done incorrectly so can lapping. If it’s carbon you aren’t really fixing anything just getting the numbers up to pass a test, the carbon may or may not reoccur, carbon formation is more likely ROP than LOP but often it’s from oil so mixture may not have always have a great effect Lapping won’t remove any significant metal and recondition seats, if you lap aggressively attempting to recondition seats you will wear a ridge into the valve / seat. Then as was already stated other things like clearance between the valve and guide can be causing the leak. Compression testers, actually leak down testers are so cheap and easy to use it might be worth purchasing one for yourself, a lot can be learned by listening for where the leak noise is heard, if heard in the intake, it’s the intake valve, same for exhausts and of course if heard / felt from crankcase breather it’s the rings. LOP or ROP isn’t really the issue, avoiding detonation and keeping temps in check are. It is however easier to avoid detonation and keep temps down ROP than LOP, so for new pilots especially it’s likely better to start ROP and not worrying about it and once everything about operating the aircraft is down pat add LOP to your technique. It may also not be a bad idea if things get complex requiring more attention than normal like bad Wx etc to just default back to ROP and remove that from your task loading.
  9. I used to be that way for about 20 years, but the 2% loans made me borrow for the first time in twenty years. Truth is I’ll never pay off this house most likely as the loan is longer than my probable life expectancy, and that’s a little sobering, just as the truth that when it needs a new roof, not much point in going for a 30 yr one A whole lot of people were upside down in their houses not too long ago too so it’s not just airplanes, just we can do without them.
  10. Neighbor is building two RV-14’s with IO-390’s. Attached photo is the way they came from Lycoming. It’s an automobile plug and an adapter, of course we can’t because we aren’t Experimental, but if Lycoming ships them this way it obviously works. What does a new Certified Lycoming ship with? If fine wires made better power then surely they would come with them? I have no idea what they come with, Factory new engines are way out of my price bracket. So far as LOP my engine with massives will smoothly run so LOP that it won’t make enough power to maintain level flight. But then it’s a blueprinted engine too, but I can’t imagine what fine wires could do to improve on that. My last two airplanes had fine wires, I like them as I believe if properly cleaned they will likely last the life of the engine, but everything has a value attached to them and I think they are just simply priced beyond their value now.
  11. I had assumed it was on the nose wheel. I suspect if it’s ground contact that you’re going to have to a very significant downforce to get sufficient traction, probably more than that handle can take. By making it contact the front tire and especially if it’s small diameter and if you put the driving mechanism close to the pivot point that gives you greater leverage so that the down force required isn’t so great, plus a smaller drive wheel gives you even greater gear reduction, but being small may reduce traction on the tire. I have a Sidewinder, it’s gear reduction I think occurs first in the Milwaukee angle drive, then again in both of the chain drive sections and it of course has a small heavily toothed drive roller. I think you’ll know when you try it, everything until then is just guessing. I wish you luck, just don’t give up if it doesn’t work like you want right away
  12. In flight school flying the little TH-55 which is the Hughes 269 / 300 with a Lycoming IO-360 we never flew straight lines going from one stage field to another, we flew from one forced landing area to another. The instructors were contract Civilians working for Pan-Am, they were all Vietnam vets, they would frequently as in a t least a couple times per flight, snap the throttle to idle and of course you would then have to autorotate. I never had it happen to me, but apparently the little Lycoming was bad about quitting every so often when the throttle went from wide open to idle suddenly, remember there is no prop to drive it. When it did that of course the practice Auto became real.
  13. I think his point is without the Instrument your not for lack of a better term a “full pilot”. I concur with that personally. I think if you plan on traveling especially if at night your unsafe without the Instrument rating, remember this is just my opinion.
  14. 1. yes, there is a free wheeling unit, a clutch if you will that allows the drive train to overrun the engine(s), the drive train is interconnected. if the engine doesn’t decouple you cannot autorotate. You have a tachometer on a single engine helicopter with two needles on top of each other, one is engine and the other the rotor, they should always be joined in normal flight. 2. No, all my time after flight school was in a twin engine helicopter. I did have two engine failures though, one the gas generator let go in a test flight where one engine was off line and the second engine was being tested for contingency power, meaning higher limits are automatically enabled if one engine quits, and I had a failure of the Engine Control Unit that made it cut to idle, that one I was able to manually override. I’ve had three engine failures in my Career, two in the helicopter and one in the Experimental GE Thrush, all turbines. The GE I got luckily in it let go at altitude real close to an airport that I was able to make and we took the airplane apart and trucked it home. The GE had a Walter E-11 engine as the GE engine wasn’t yet Certified, the GE evolved from the Walter so all of the fittings etc were identical allowing us to build the airplane before the engine was Certified, the Walter just didn’t have as much power and I’m afraid that I was pulling the guts out of it pretty frequently and it finally succumbed to repeated thermal stress. I’ve never had an inflight engine problem in a piston, but then I’d guess maybe only 20% of my total time is in a piston, all single engine.
  15. Helicopter flight: "A bunch of spare parts flying in close formation." "Anything that screws its way into the sky flies according to unnatural principals." You never want to sneak up behind an old high-time helicopter pilot and clap your hands. He will instantly dive for cover and most likely whimper...then get up and smack the crap out of you. There are no old helicopters laying around airports like you see old airplanes. There is a reason for this. Come to think of it, there are not many old high-time helicopter pilots hanging around airports either so the first issue is mute. You can always tell a helicopter pilot in anything moving: a train, an airplane, a car or a boat. They never smile, they are always listening to the machine and they always hear something they think is not right. Helicopter pilots fly in a mode of intensity, actually more like "spring loaded" while waiting for pieces of their ship to fall off. Flying a helicopter at any altitude over 500 feet is considered reckless and should be avoided. Flying a helicopter at any altitude or condition that precludes a landing in less than 20 seconds is considered outright foolhardy. Remember in a helicopter you have about one second to lower the collective in an engine failure before the craft becomes unrecoverable. Once you've failed this maneuver the machine flies about as well as a 2 ton meat locker. Even a perfectly executed autorotation only gives you a glide ratio slightly better than that of a brick. A corollary to this: H-53 Pilots are taught autorotation procedures so that they will have something to do with their hands and feet while they plummet to the death. When your wings are leading, lagging, flapping, precessing and moving faster than your fuselage there's something unnatural going on. Is this the way men were meant to fly? While hovering, if you start to sink a bit, you pull up on the collective while twisting the throttle, push with your left foot (more torque) and move the stick left (more translating tendency) to hold your spot. If you now need to stop rising, you do the opposite in that order. Sometimes in wind you do this many times each second. Great fun is letting a fighter pilot go for a ride and try this. Yes it is! For Helicopters: You never want to feel a sinking feeling in your gut (low "g" pushover) while flying a two bladed under slung teetering rotor system. You are about to do a snap-roll to the right and crash. For that matter, any remotely aerobatic maneuver should be avoided in a Huey. Don't push your luck. It will run out soon enough anyway. If everything is working fine on your helicopter consider yourself temporarily lucky. Something is about to break. There are two types of helicopter pilots: Those that have crashed, and those that are going to. Harry Reasoner once wrote the following about helicopter pilots: "The thing is, helicopters are different from planes. An airplane by its nature wants to fly, and if not interfered with too strongly by unusual events or by an incompetent pilot, it will fly. A helicopter does not want to fly. It is maintained in the air by a variety of forces and controls working in opposition to each other, and if there is any disturbance in this delicate balance the helicopter stops flying; immediately and disastrously. There is no such thing as a gliding helicopter. This is why being a helicopter pilot is so different from being an airplane pilot, and why in generality, airplane pilots are open, clear-eyed, buoyant extroverts and helicopter pilots are brooding introspective anticipators of trouble. They know if something bad has not happened it is about to." Having said all this, I must admit that flying in a helicopter is one of the most satisfying and exhilarating experiences I have ever enjoyed: skimming over the tops of trees at 100 knots is something we should all be able to do at least once.
  16. I don’t know anything about Mooney’s business. But as a VP of an aircraft manufacturer for 15 years or so I suspicion that their overhead is killing them. I assume or suspicion that they have an entire aircraft factory that they have to keep maintained as electric bill, keeping the roof from leaking and it’s likely old, meaning the repairs aren’t insignificant. I think the factory is a White Elephant. “A white elephant is a possession that its owner cannot dispose of, and whose cost, particularly that of maintenance, is out of proportion to its usefulness.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_elephant
  17. Electric shop had a sign on the wall, it said. “At some point you have to shoot the Engineers and just build the damn thing” I called their continual redesigns “creeping elegance” Every time they would design something, they would take a look at it and decide they could make it better if they started over, that’s Creeping Elegence.
  18. I think you have something. I like simple. When I was building aircraft I used to say if it’s simple and it works, it ain’t stupid. A Play on KISS. God love our Engineers, they were good but if you let them they would build a nuclear powered wrist watch, when a wind up works.
  19. Might could accomplish something similar by letting air out assuming it has air in it. If he has the gear ratio right I think he’s got something, is it variable speed? Mount the motor closer to the tire (shorter chain) and it could fold in half just past the motor. Simple plate welded on each side with a pin to go through the plates to hold it in place when unfolded.
  20. That’s the ugly truth in my opinion for most all GA aircraft, but especially a Mooney. I’m an old IA myself and while I can make many parts, some like gear actuators I just can’t, even something as simple as a no back spring is a show stopper. I think Mooney still existing as a company may be hurting us somewhat as maybe it’s keeping companies that manufacture under PMA parts for other antique aircraft from making parts out of respect I’ll call it. Most Mooney’s are antiques whether we like to think that or not, to the FAA all Mooney’s are. That’s pure speculation of course but I think something is keeping Univair and others from making parts. I’ve not had any problem getting parts for my 1946 Cessna as an example or for that matter our 1923 Ford Model T, but the Mooney it’s getting tough, and many or most IA’s are wary of non Mooney parts even though they are identical but don’t have the Mooney part number. One neighbor backed into another’s Bravo tail with their car, it’s likely he will be without the aircraft for a year or more and the person performing the repairs will have to come here and live to conduct the repair most likely as transporting a Mooney by truck is a whole lot more work than it is for many aircraft, parts will of course have to be fabricated or come from a salvage aircraft. Back in the day it would have been fixed with new factory parts or scrapped in a month or two. I don’t know what the future holds, I’m pessimistic, as an old Helicopter pilot that’s my nature. I think if I were a younger man and was honestly looking for an aircraft that I was hoping to keep for 30 years or something I’d look for a Cessna or Beech as I think it’s likely those companies will still be in business for the foreseeable future as Beech builds the King air and 1900 etc and Cessna has a successful line of bizjets, and being an old guy I just don’t like plastic, or maybe Experimental. Only reason I’m not flying Experimental now is I’m an IA and the benefits aren’t as great. 4K is really nothing for an Annual, for a comparison I have a Motorhome in the shop right now with the oil cooler leaking coolant, cost to R&R the cooler? $4K and that’s at a private shop not the factory engine shop.
  21. A turbo retract anything is WAY too much airplane for a newly minted Private Pilot, there is a reason insurance is so expensive, odds are good it won’t end well. A newly minted Private Pilot has shown the min proficiency required to safely operate a simple aircraft in pretty VFR Wx and that’s about it, it has to be that way if the training required complex proficiency in hard IFR very few would complete the program, too much money and too long to complete. Take a look over at the accident thread, see how many are from new owners, much less new pilots. People like to throw out there that the Military trains in complex aircraft, but having gone through that training it’s nothing like Civilian training or it wasn’t almost 40 years ago, so yes it possible to start in a complex aircraft and it helps if it’s your total job and you spend nearly a year doing so at 10 plus hours a day 6 days a week. You live, and breathe flying all day, every day. We weren’t necessarily better or smarter, just we were immersed and very highly motivated. Find something and rent it for the first 100 hours, get your Instrument rating and more importantly become proficient at it, once you get the Instrument every flight should be IFR. So you delay your Mooney purchase for 6 months, is that too long to wait? If your dedicated you can get 100 hours in six months, going to require funds and dedication though, lots of work. Most training other than Civilian recreational trains a competent Co-pilot who then flies for significant time with a more experienced PIC and continues to learn, it’s mostly only recreational pilots that on completing the Private are turned loose by themselves
  22. Due to the arm difference you would save some weight, but I can’t imagine the weight would be enough to justify the price. Anyone know what the “Instructions for Continued Airworthiness” is for these things? do you do capacity checks or similar yearly? Ref yearly cap checks, most of us don’t have the $$$ to invest in a “real” capacity tester so we Rube Goldberg something like light bulbs as a load etc. and keep track of time, but as voltage drops the amp draw increases so it’s not real accurate but close enough. A couple of months ago I put LifePo4 batteries in my Golf Cart and due to some extent the relatively flat voltage discharge it went dead on me and I had to tow it home. So I installed a Columb counter battery monitor a few days ago which tracks amp hour usage very accurately, thing costs about $30 and is dead nuts accurate. Well I had an epiphany, this thing would be perfect for doing a cap check on an aircraft battery, simply connect it to your battery apply a load and when you hit terminating voltage it will tell you exactly in amp hours what your batteries capacity is.
  23. It’s not as much as you might think, I know it surprised me too, but watch Cyl head temp, if there is a lot of cooling the temps will drop drastically, one would suppose especially the front two, but they don’t, there is no drastic drop even with the front two.
  24. As these things age it gets tougher and tougher to find a good one, and to be truthful often they want more than many are willing to pay. It’s not hard for the cost to bring an older airplane back to exceed its value, that’s true with everything though I guess. Be very wary of one that’s priced good, there is often a reason for that.
  25. Possible, but as an old man watching it seems that those higher returns come at a higher risk, and I’ve seen that not work so well, not uncommon actually. Except for unusual instances it’s non sensical for investments to return in excess to loan rates. That happened during Covid with the Government loosening the money supply to the point of essentially zero percent prime, last time that happened I think was 08, both of course to stimulate the economy. The 80’s of course were well horrible, let’s hope we don’t get that kind of inflation again. I was just wondering why is all. I can understand the not wanting to watch a whole lot of money disappear for example, that had a lot to do with me not paying cash for the car / house because because my gut feeling has always been if you can pay for something, do so, but it was hard to go against the fact that 2% interest is arguably “free” money. I didn’t know if inflation or anything else was skewing the thinking was all. An argument can be made too I think that the current rates aren’t historically high, nor are they likely to go down much in the near term.
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