Slick Nick

Pre buy inspections are money well spent, no matter if you end up buying the aircraft, or walking away from it. Sure, you spent $5000 on it, but that likely saved you tens of thousands of dollars down the road had you actually gone through with the purchase. Money well spent as far as you should be concerned. Trying to recoup the cost of a failed pre buy online? Why would anyone go there? It’s clearly bad enough to warrant walking away, even with $5000 already invested. That screams that it’s really bad. Pretty much all that a potential buyer needs to know. The details are irrelevant at that point.

It’s probably your push to talk.

The side baffle seals might be okay, but that aft one is horrible. You can see where a large section of it is folded backwards, and there’s a giant hole where there should be a duct attached. If you’re not using ducting there, plug it off. I bet by fixing those two things alone, you’ll drop your CHT’s by 50*. Didn’t you recently purchase this airplane? How did any of this make it past the pre buy inspection?

The KAP 150 has inputs for dimmable 28V, 14V or 5V lighting that takes care of the push buttons, display, etc. make sure that you panel lights are working properly and that they aren’t selected on by mistake.

That was my thought as well. You can almost see the marks from the pliers where it was bent up.

Explain the sequence of events when you say its off when you pull it out of the hangar. Are you powering it up inside, and then taxiing out right away? Or are you outside when applying power? It's best to have the aircraft stationary during the initial alignment. There are adjustments available on the KA 51/51A to calibrate the 4 cardinal headings. Your A&P will find them in the manual. That all being said, if the gyro itself is worn, all the adjustment in the world won't help it, and usually you'd only need to adjust it if it was constantly off by the same amount. The fact that you're able to slew it manually and then have it stay when you switch back to slave tells me something else is up. The 525 is just the indicator, it could also be the KG 102 gyro in the tail or the KMT 112 magnetometer (unlikely.) If a G5 isn't in the cards right now, consider a used KI 525. They rarely fail, and used ones have come down in price since they are abundant with everyone ripping them out in favor of G5's etc. Then your downtime is limited to an hour, instead of a week for a full install.

I think that’s a KA 51A slaving accessory if memory serves. I can’t recall if there are adjustments on that unit or if you need to clock the magnetometer. One thing at a time. Either the HSI is getting incorrect information, or it’s getting good information and it has an issue displaying it properly.

Those baffle seals look janky as hell. I’d start there for sure.

You shouldn’t need to align it yourself. Leave the switch in slave. On the KCS 55A power up it does a quick slave for the first 2 minutes, and then will fine tune from there. There are adjustments on the slaving accessory. Which one do you have? A photo would help. The KA 51B was most popular. Do you not have a nav radio or is it set to display on another instrument?

How does the hub look where the bulkhead sits? There should be some soft chafe tape on it that helps center the bulkhead.

That's a KI 525. Very robust HSI. Before you spend money on an avionics guy, go up and do an approach (in VMC obviously) on an ILS. Leave the GPS totally out of the picture. See if the behavior is the same, or if it's isolated to the signal coming from the GPS. The slaving system is part of the KCS 55A install, there are several components at work. It's entirely separate from the navigational inputs on the HSI. Is your slaving control set to slave, or is it in "free" mode?

Found a photo in a thread I posted many moons ago:

There was another company that made the belly panel with the “strakes” on the bottom. Try and find out who that was and if you could get one.

Yeah, well, in 2024, my prop was OVERHAULED too, and started pissing oil only 150 hours later. Had a different shop rebuild it, and the bearings were shot. The spec on those bearings is pretty tight. At overhaul time, they are a go/no go item. They can be right on the cusp of being toast, and the prop shop can still reuse them and legally call it an overhaul unless you’ve specified new bearings, or they take the onus to change them. It doesn’t take long once the blades are allowed to move in the thrust direction. Within 50 hours of the first symptoms, I was getting splatter on the windshield. My blades had no tangible play in them when I checked, but the prop shop said they were way beyond spec. If you are able to feel play, the hub itself is probably buggered. Cost me $650 and 3 days to have the prop rebuilt with new bearings and seals. Hasn’t leaked a drop since. The moral of the story is, just because a prop has been overhauled, doesn’t mean jack. Especially here in Canada where we have the mandatory 10 year overhaul rule, regardless if the blades have turned or not.

Your bearings are toast. The best and newest o rings in the world can't seal against excessive play in the blades due to worn bearings.

I was always under the impression that the Cirrus wouldn't pass spin certification tests, so the chute was added in order to receive the ELOS exemption. "This airplane won't recover from a spin, so we needed to add a parachute to the entire airframe so you won't die." doesn't sound good to customers when you're trying to sell airplanes, so the marketing geniuses instead spun it into a "revolutionary safety feature, not available on any of our competitors aircraft!" It worked.

The parts catalogs for most models are available in the downloads section of MooneySpace.

Why isn't the A&P diagnosing this for you? You paid him to install the gauge, it was done improperly. He should be making it right.

Should be no issue, the J step is a more streamlined design if you can find one, talk to your mechanic and see if they're happy installing that modification.

The weather briefings I find for the most part, they just present the information that you can obtain yourself, with no real context. In my experience, they just read off what the prog charts are saying. The guys at Leidos actually seem to have an understanding of the weather systems on a much more involved scale, they can give you information that's not available on the charts, especially if you're unfamiliar with the local climate, they can provide you with some valuable insight to assist in your decision making. As for the service, where to begin? Constant IFR flow delays into Vancouver on sunny, clear VFR days. Calgary is starting to see that now too. Temporary tower closures in Kelowna and Winnipeg due to staffing shortages. Flying around capped at 29,000' because there's nobody to staff the IFR high sector in CZEG or CZVR. Landing in YVR with ground, clearance delivery, and tower all on a bridged frequency because there are only two controllers working the entire airport. Decomissioning damn near every ground based navaid in the country in favor of "mandatory" RNAV routing. (FYI: they can not deny service if you are unable RNAV, although they will try.) Decomissioning ground based radar to save money, shifting the cost burden to the users by "mandating" 1090 ADS-B. Year after year, the service gets worse, and the fees never change. The infrastructure is lacking, the staffing issues have no solution in sight. Flying in the USA is a breath of fresh air compared to Canada in terms of quality of service. I spend 600-700 hours a year flying in NavCan’s airspace, and most of it is an exercise in frustration. To be clear, I take no issue with the controllers, briefers, and staff themselves. They are professionals, and doing the best they can within the confines of the organization and policies they work under. The issue I take is with NavCan as a whole. It's a private company with a monopoly on the market, hence zero accountability. There's no incentive to improve.

It's not just electrical failure. There have been countless of incidents of the 650's locking up in flight. Leaving you with an unresponsive unit, unable to interact with it to so much as change a frequency. How will you "exit" IMC if you can't shoot an approach? The second radio is absolutely worth it, especially to someone like yourself who has limited IFR experience. It could save your life. Have the second radio hooked up to your standby loc/gs indicator there, so you're not stuck when the G5 konks out. The more redundancy you have the better.

NavCan sucks. They're useless.

I got some replacements from LASAR.

It’s likely an issue with the gauge.

You don’t need it on the ground during the daytime. Your previous post said you never turned it off, ever, so I assumed that meant during the day as well. If it’s night and you need it to see, absolutely. But during the day, using some discretion is good airmanship.