Utah20Gflyer

I spent about 40k upgrading my Mooney and feel like it was a great investment. The plane is really well equipped and basically does all the same things that people get spending 90k, just with smaller screens. The one thing I’m still missing is an auto pilot which I’ll do in the next couple of years unless I end upgrading to a six place plane. Having a WAAS navigator is great. Having two modern digital radios is great Having fuel gauges accurate to .1 gallons is great Having an engine monitor so I have all that information readily available is great. Traffic displayed on the panel is great. Having no vacuum system is great. To others maybe they’d prefer the 40k in an account and keep old radios that don’t or hardly work. And fuel gauges that don’t work and rely heavily on an IPad for navigation and information. That’s an option. Personally I prefer the plane to be up to date.

I would start to think about it above 10k but it wouldn’t be an automatic deal killer. It would depend a lot on condition and how it was being maintained. My plane has under 4k hours.

As previously mentioned Corrosion is probably the ultimate deal breaker as it can easily total a plane if it’s in a critical area. I would say the biggest thing you want to look for is a plane that flies a lot and is getting maintained. It should be kept clean with an absolute minimum of squawks. What ever you find initially will only scratch the surface of what’s actually there. The top end of the market will generally provide the lowest total cost of ownership. There are a lot of flying projects out there. Unless you like spending lots of money and not flying I would avoid those.

I’ve been doing basic med for a while so unfortunately I don’t have any AME recommendations.

I doubt that mod would get you even one full knot. I have a non flush handle and still sits pretty flush. When my step is down that costs me 3 knots and it’s absolutely huge compared to my baggage door handle. Probably 100x the drag profile. If you want to do it for looks I can understand that but for speed? Nah!

A multimeter should be able to answer your question definitely. 1. check voltage at master switch input 2. Check voltage at master switch output with switch in the on position. 3. Check voltage at relay input 4. Check voltage at relay output Also verify all wiring connections are tight while you do this. If there is anything else between the battery and the bus like a fuse/breaker then check before and after that too. This will tell you where the problem is. Pretty easy. Your back up GI 275 won’t start up in back up mode unless it gets some power initially to tell it to be on in reversionary mode.

I use them 99 percent of the time. I primarily bought them to avoid having to remove snow, ice and frost from my wings. A secondary purpose was to protect the paint from sun damage which is why I almost always use them. They have been very effective but do add probably 15 minutes to each flight for taking them off and putting them both on. Sometimes I wonder if all that time is worth it but now that I have them I feel uncomfortable not putting them on. I think they will also provide some marginal hail protection. I didn’t get the hail version but if I had it to do it over again I would. In addition to the wing covers I have a cabin cover, tail covers and an anti bird spiky thing I put on top of the vertical stabilizer. I do find all of these things disincentivize short flights. I don’t do many one hour flights around the pattern anymore but doesn’t seem like a big deal for 4 hour cross country flights. Not sure what else to do though, I can’t stomach the thought of my plane rotting away outside without any protection.

This was my thought. If your plane can lift 1000 lbs with 60mph of wind under the wings under normal operation I don’t see 50 or 100 lbs doing much if the wind starts blowing hard.

It’s probably worth more than it should be. There always seems to be someone around who thinks they can get a plane flying with what is a completely unrealistic estimate on what it will cost. It’s probably worth 20k but if he put it up for 50k someone would think that’s a steal for a plane that could be worth 125k-150k in good condition. This is what actually dooms planes to being parts. The guy who buys it for 50 will never get it flying and then 10 years later it’s scrap. To me it would be worth 0 dollars because I have no interest in a multi year 6 figure project. The only way I could see it being worth doing is if you enjoy working on airplanes more than you enjoy flying them.

175kts at 10gph is going to be something you only get while sucking the O2.

I think a M20k would match the performance numbers of the turbo Cardinal and hit your budget requirements.

The Fuel pump was down at my airport for a year. I did what you are talking about and picked up fuel at other airports and took it to my plane. While 5 gallon cans work they are a little suboptimal. I bought a 14 gallon polymer tank with a hose and spout and primarily used that. Only modification I made to that was installing an air fitting to the cap so I could pump air into the tank to force the fuel out of the tank and up and into my tank. This way the tank could be sitting on the ground. I still occasionally use it to get fuel before I fly so I don’t have to start the plane up, taxi over, shut down, fuel up and then restart. It’s a little simpler to drive by the pump, fill up the tank and then add the fuel as part of my pre flight.

Throw in some G5s a GTN 355 and call it a day. It should be sub 20k and your planes value will go up 10-15k. The rest if you amortize it over 10 years is a rounding error in plane ownership. If you aren’t periodically updating your panel then you are devaluing your airplane in my opinion. Anything now that doesn’t have a WAAS GPS navigator and a couple glass instruments is now sub standard in my book and I think the general market is about there as well. The relative cost has gone down and the utility has increased greatly. To me it just doesn’t make sense to have a VFR Mooney anymore.

I’ve been modifying my gas cans as described but I don’t think I would carry gas cans in the cabin of my plane. Seems like that would be a good way to make sure you were burnt to death in the case of a crash. Of course I would never carry gasoline in a modified gas cans because of my immense respect for the safety bureaucracy which has made gas cans unusable. I’m positive they did this because it’s actually a bad idea to carry gasoline in a can in any situation and they are just helping us out. I use my modified cans to carry inert liquids such as water and pudding.

I’d call Duncan who holds the STC and just verify that your model isn’t one of the ones that they are having parts compatibility issues with. Duncan wrongly assumed that all of the planes on the STC shared common parts with the plane they used to certify the auto pilot. There have been quite a few people who have ordered the Aerocruz 100 and found it didn’t fit.