Utah20Gflyer

I did the conversion using thermoformed abs plastic adapters I made myself. It turned out quite nicely and was pretty cheap if you exclude all the time I put into it. You should be able to find my thread where I documented it with lots of pictures. I’ll attach an after pic here.

You can’t even legally split costs under this particular scenario let alone pay for all the fuel plus additional food compensation. The pilot flying you there would have to have a common purpose for going to North Carolina in order to qualify even for cost sharing. You could rent a plane and pay a pilot with a commercial certificate to fly you there. Unfortunately if the pilot being compensated also owns the plane that makes it look like an illegal charter to the FAA. Im sure you made the offer in good faith and I could see how you might be taken back a bit by the response so far but a PUBLIC offer to break FARs to a bunch of strangers I guess isn’t the sweet deal you may have thought it was. If you do buy a Mooney and have questions or issues you want to discuss I promise you we will be more supportive in that scenario.

This is the correct answer as far as I understand things. Get your insurance now and then have Avemco update your rate once you get your IR. I wouldn’t go without insurance because you may get a lower rate in the future, especially since you are statistically most likely to have an issue in your first 100 hours in a new plane.

If someone has clean annuals but is doing regular maintenance between them that wasn’t what I was trying to warn about. It’s the plane that has 8 years of consecutive annuals with nothing else in the logbooks that concerns me. I looked at a plane like that and at the time it made me nervous, after having owned a Mooney for a couple years I would view that as a definite red flag. It’s just not believable that you would have zero issues with a 50 year old plane over the course of 8 years. Old planes need lots of love to keep them in good condition. Regular attention to squawks like you are talking about indicates a plane is cared about. If a person is the type who really cares about the condition of their plane it pays to buy from someone who cared about it, otherwise you are in for a lot of work.

I had this issue recently, in the end we towed the plane by hand and got it the first time we used that method, I think we tried 4 or 5 times taxiing the plane and it failed every time.

Carpet is cheap to replace in comparison to a lot of other things. Is the paint job in good condition excluding the less than ideal initial quality? If it’s serviceable it won’t be an item for negotiation on the price. It’s 20k to repaint, so a significant cost if it’s something you can’t live with. Personally I greatly prefer vernier controls over a throttle quadrant. It makes it a lot easier to make fine adjustments to the controls. Having a WAAS gps and an autopilot makes it a good cross country and IFR platform. These are really expensive upgrades if you don’t have them. The 430 is losing support but you have the avidyne as an affordable slide in upgrade path. If the engine has been flown regularly and everything looks in good order I wouldn’t worry about 1800 hours on the engine. You don’t have to do an overhaul at 2000 hours. The biggest issue is how the plane has been maintained. Have things been getting attended to? Are there lots of annuals with nothing done other than the annual itself? How many squawks does it have? How many INOP items. If you know of a bunch of things that don’t work it indicates a minimalist maintenance attitude which means after you buy it there will be lots of other things you will find that have not been attended to and will cost you money.

When my mechanic replaced my main shock disks he used a ratchet strap to compress the disks enough to put the hardware back on. He removed the landing gear from the plane which might be a factor in using this method.

This is actually a project I’ve bought materials for and plan on completing in the near future. It includes a method of installing and removing without the need of a ladder. I’ll post details when I complete it.

I don’t know for sure but the speaker in my plane looks like a generic speaker you would buy off Amazon,or could be a factory Mooney speaker. I have no way of knowing the difference. You might ask your mechanic what they think of potential sources for speakers. They may be fine with any speaker that matches the specifications of the original.

I run an O-360 so I won’t comment on rich or lean of peak but I think the WOT and 2400 rpm is a very common power setting for cruise for all vintage Mooneys. Lately I’ve been experimenting with reducing throttle until I see the faintest sign of manifold pressure reduction and then leaving it there. I haven’t come to any conclusion however on whether this is a practice that is worthwhile. Cruise altitude is a function of the distance you are flying and terrain clearance requirements. I fly in the mountains so 9500 to 12500 is where I cruise at based on not wanting to run into mountains. If you are a flat lander then the longer the trip the more worthwhile it will be to climb. For my plane I’ll burn 11 gph at 6500 WOT /2400 for 150 knots or 8 gph at 10500 for 145 knots. I personally prefer loosing 5 knots and keeping the 3 gallons per hour. I think a normally aspirated mooney is at its prime in the 10-11k altitude. Foreflight is nice because it quickly shows you flight time versus fuel burn based on cruise altitude as well as terrain clearance requirements. That is how I normally choose an altitude.

I haven’t done my commercial yet but I do practice power off 180s sometimes. What I’ve noticed is because the winds are always different there is no recipe for success, and I think that is the point of the exercise. You have a different situation each time and a tool bag of tricks to accomplish your goal.

This isn’t really the issue I am confused about. I think everyone is in the same page with counterfeit parts that will kill you or a lot of other people if they fail. I’m referring to something like the owner produced down lock blocks or these landing gear pucks which seemingly fall under owner produced parts or vintage aircraft parts yet the FAA issues letters saying people are selling unapproved parts and they shouldn’t be installed in airplanes. If someone produces an owner produced down block which the FAA seemed to believe didn’t qualify as an owner produced part, why would that matter if it was a vintage aircraft? According to their latest memo some parts don’t have to be approved so why are they issuing letters saying don’t install them? Hopefully this makes more sense. These landing gear pucks don’t need to be approved based on what I think the vintage aircraft memo said but is the FAA going to issue a letter in a couple months saying they are selling unapproved parts and they shouldn’t have been installed into an aircraft?

I’m a little confused about the recent FAA memo issued about being able to use off the shelf parts for aircraft approved before 1980 but the seemingly contrary action they took against owner produced down lock blocks. If you can buy an off the shelf part then why can’t someone make a part and sell it to someone else and skip the approval process? Why no approval process for a wheel bearing but you do need approval for a down lock block? Neither is a critical component. Seems like there is far too much grey area. Unclear regulation with selective enforcement is probably the worst situation possible.

During my recent avionics upgrade my altitude encoder was removed because apparently if you have a GI 275 and a digital transponder the GI 275 can give the transponder the altitude information. So I don’t know the exact answer to your question but it may be possible depending on the combination of avionics you install.

I don’t think you can do a gross weight increase without a substantial amount of work. I think you would have to get an STC issued by the FAA with all the associated documentation and possibly flight testing. The biggest downside to a G is the gross weight is 50lbs less than a C model. As a G owner I wouldn’t have ever considered something that would substantially increase the weight, in fact I have very consciously tried to reduce the weight of my aircraft at every opportunity. I’d be interested in knowing what kind of speed it’s getting.

Combine artificial intelligence, social media, deep fakes and some corrupt human beings and you have all the ingredients for a dystopian future. Instead of using a picture of clippy it should be HAL 9000.

This is what my panel looks like after a very similar upgrade. Behind the left side of the pilots yoke is a Garmin double usb charger that you can’t see. I’ve made a new cover plate for the hole on the right side of the panel but haven’t taken a picture since I made it. I would absolutely recommend the GI 275s for vintage Mooneys. In addition to the extra features they allow the removal of up to 4 instruments that gives you more flexibility with a panel that is a bit challenged for space.

If it were me and the plane has been flying regularly and everything seems to be in good working order I would get an IRAN done. When performing an IRAN they should replace everything that is substandard. This may be much less than an overhaul or could be much more. They could even end up telling you the mag isn’t repairable. The only difference between the two choices is with the Overhaul they will replace certain parts whether they need to or not. Either way all the parts that aren’t up to snuff will have to be replaced.

Looks like Alpha aviation has 3 point kits for the rear seats. The real question is how to attach the shoulder strap. The above linked thread mentioned attaching the shoulder harness to the structural bulkhead? But I’m not sure what that means. Does the steel cage not extend far enough rearward to use it as the attachment point? If you can use the steel cage you could use the same type of clamp on bracket that people use for front seat retrofits. If anyone has a picture of the rear attachment points on a retrofit that would be very useful.

What about repairing the tube with a patch temporarily?

I’m 6’2” and 215 lbs at the moment and I fit just fine in my Mooney, so I suspect you will fit fine, although you sit in a much different position than in a Cessna so you will have to see if you like it or not. A Cessna is like sitting in a chair, a Mooney more resembles sitting in a sports car. A Mooney is an excellent cross country aircraft. When it comes to upgrading it is much cheaper not to. Much cheaper to just buy what you want, or you could you could ignore this wisdom like I did and bring an older Mooney up to modern standards by the application of large amounts of money and patience. I’d offer you a ride but I’m about a thousand miles west of you. Welcome and good luck!

If it were me I would spray in some lubricant, then put a layer of high quality duct tape on both sides of the lever, then carefully use some channel locks to gently rock back and forth while also pulling straight off.

It pulls straight off, I’ve removed those before so I am absolutely sure. Yours must be on extra tight.

You would be surprised what can be repaired when it comes to interior plastic. A couple annuals ago my Mooney was in the shop for its first annual that lasted 3 and 1/2 months. At one point a person turned a plane around in front of the hanger and my ceiling plastic got blown off my wing and broke into probably 30 pieces. I thought initially I would just buy a new one but after quite a bit of looking I could never find anything I was confident was going to work. So I spent probably 4-5 hours carefully putting everything back together including forming pieces that were lost to get it all together again, Then I painted it. now it looks better than it ever did and is actually significantly more structurally sound than before I started. Personally I would just bite the bullet and fix what you have. Attached is a pic of what it looked like after being resurrected.

Is it on the field? I haven’t tried it.