RJBrown

My airport car 10-15 years ago was a 72 Mercede 280 SE 4.5. As a "collector" car plates lasted 5 years and did not need inspections. battery tender is always a good idea.

I own a car repair shop, have for over 31 years. If pilots were treated the way I treat drivers this would not be an issue. I charge $95 an hour. At $95 I am slightly higher than my local MSC. My complaint is not about labor rates. My complaint is about the propensity of airplane mechanics to charge for repairing their own mistakes and for bumbling around not knowing what to fix and charging for "learning". Learning how to fix something is not the responsibility of the car/plane owner. A mechanic should know his job, he should not charge a higher time because he had to learn. We use a flat rate manual to determine labor costs. The job pays a certain amount. If an inexperienced man takes longer than it should to fix something it should not cost more. Conversely if an experienced man can fix it quickly he should not be paid less.

Face it in a straight comparison of speed Bonanza is slower. If you factor in fuel consumtion it is even slower. 300 HP in both airframes really shows the difference. Similar useful means the Bonanza has 2 extra useless seats and goes 20+ knots slower. If you do real comparisons Fuel /distance/ time/payload the Mooney will always come out on top. Shall I repeat the story about the time I walked the Baron? The increased drag of the Beech products leaves them behind. 200 hp Mooney is slower than a 300hp Bonanza by brute force. But a 270 HP Mooney is faster than that same 300 hp Bonanza. The 225 hp Beech and the 180 hp mooney are similar speeds but not fuel consumption. The only advantage for 6 standard passengers is if your trip is under 100 miles. Fueled for the same distance any useful advantage by the Bonanza is gone. Flown with 1 or 2 as 90% of flights are similarly powered Mooneys will always arrive first and use less fuel. If you want to brag about how it makes you feel to drive a Bonanza be my guest but dont brag about raw speed cause it ain't there. No sir "YOU WISH"

Once again we have a maitainence induced fault. Someone OOPS during annual. Don't let him charge you for his mistake. You missed a flight cause HE messed up. He probably dropped the plug on the ground and didn't regap it. Or something as simple. Accept his apology with grace but not a bill.

Seeing statements like this boil my blood. Something HE did is causing the problem. You should not have to pay extra for him to find his mistake. No one in the car repair business would last very long charging extra to fix their own mistakes. We as a group are a bunch of suckers to fall for this garbage. On Dec 1st I got my plane back from an engine O/H. They hired a pilot to bring it over and I flew him back to Montrose. I walked up as he got out of my plane on APA. He told me the fuel flow gauge was erratic. So before we took off I called Wester Skyways to alert them to the need to recheck the work. The person on the other end got nasty and ask if I were accusing them of something. I sad no I just wanted to alert them that it needed looked at when I arrived. He then got even nastier and said no one does that on Saturday and that I was going to have to live with it. Well I got nasty back and told them to sue me for the balance due and that I would have someone else check their work. Shortly thereafter the guy I had been working with called me and ask that I give him a chance to address the issue. Sure enough a wire connection was loose and got fixed. NO EXTRA CHARGE!! If I ran my auto repair shop like all these airplane repair shops are run I would not be able to own and fly my own airplane. Turns out it was the owner of the company with the bad people skills while the IA/AP I dealt with was a great guy putting out the fire his boss caused. Don't put up with this kind of abuse and maybe they will improve their diagnostic skills and the problem will end. To pay people more money to cover incorrectly done work is crazy. It works against getting proper work in the first place. Airplanes are NOT complicated machines. There is nothing special about them. Cars are way more complicated. Don't be fooled by the mystique of it being an airplane. This is 50's technology it ain't rocket science. Don't put up with "parts changers" either. The lets just keep changing parts until the magic happens is just stupid.

My old 231 did not have speed brakes and I never thought about them. After it was converted to a Rocket I found I really needed them. Had them and long range tanks installed when it was painted. A Rocket really needs both. My current J does not have or need speed brakes. I consider them a waste of money on a J but worth their weight in gold on a Rocket. After spending 800 hour in a Rocket a 4000# Mooney is not impossible. They will lift more than the gear will land for sure. Problem is it will gain weight somewhere to gain the structure needed to certify. But a Bonanza is so Slow.........

We looked at grassy meadows before we bought at Pegasus. What lot and what did it cost? If you don't mind. Did you get runway access to the lot or do you need a separate hanger? The runway access lots were still too high for me when we looked. St George is a great place, welcome to "Dixie". At 20 seconds you call out the Hurricane airport. To locals it is a 2 syllable word. Hurr-cun. Hur-i-cane will peg you as an outsider. A little cooler there year round than Phoenix but I hear the winter golf is great. One of my golf buddies has a second house there and we keep talking about flying in for golf but as of yet.... My "Rich Uncle" has a house and a couple of condos we have used a few times. Only problem with UT47 is the long drive into St George.

When the market crashed in Phoenix 3 years ago I bought some dirt at Pegasus Airpark. On the way home from California I dropped by and visited the gophers there. I took the long way around the mountains on the way home. Just looked at the weather icons on my computer 9 at night 12 degrees F here in Denver while it is 63 in Phoenix. If there was a house on that lot I would been better off staying there. As an added benefit the private fuel pump for Association members was $4.16 a gallon this morning. Golf courses were green to. First pic is a parting shot this morning of my lot as I took off. It is the one on the end closest to the runway. Second picture is from last Saturday flying home from Montrose. These are the mountains I did not fly over IFR today.

I was once directed into a gopher hole at an airshow in my Rocket. Cost my insurance 3 blades and a engine tear down. Last time I took that bird through the grass. Even at Oshkosh I ended up with green blades. I don't think the turbo issue is as much about take offs from Leadville as it is about climbing high. Having owned a Rocket I get uncomfortable when unable to climb with authority. There were times yesterday that I saw 65 knot ground speeds as I tried to maintain altitude over the mountains. When a mountain wave can push up and down at over 1000 fpm it is nice to be able to get above the wave.

Can't wait to follow you down to Az for the winters. Already have a homesite on Pegasus Airpark waiting to be built on. have lived in Denver for fourty years and I hate every snow flake I see. More every year. Summers in Denver and winters in Arizona sound wonderful to me.

Just had Western Skyways rebuild the engine on my plane. It has never run so smooth. Seems to go faster also. Level at 11,500 from Lake Powell to Southern California the ground speed was 165kts at times and the TAS showed 160. It took 5hr 26 min and 50.1 gal. to fly from Denver's Cenntennial airport to Oxnard California. It was a beautiful day to fly. Clear and a million the whole way. I got as high as 16,500 across the mountains and the compass was drip free. Thanks again to Don and those who answered his thread about his leaking compass. Helped make this flight possible.

You guys are Great!!! I picked up my J from Western Skyways last Saturday. It was there for an annual and a engine overhaul. They had it from 7/28/12 until 12/1/12, a little longer than the 12 week "estimate" they gave me. On the flight back from Montrose the compass was peeing on my foot. Low and behold just the moment I needed it there was a thread about just my problem. Well you talked me into it. With a trip to California on this Saturday now was the time. Two nuts hold it to the airplane once loose the light gets unplugged. Picture 1 shows the before with a "waterline" half way down the middle. Pic 2 is the screw on the back ask about above. Pic 3 cover is off. At this point all the screws come out. Both the diaphragm on the back and the glass on the front need "cut" off with a razor blade. The rear was taken off first and the remainder of the fluid drained. With both ends open you can clean off the old gasket material. The glass on the front goes on one way. Note the direction and side the bevel is on. The front gaskets are not symmetrical there is a top and a bottom. Once aware that there is a difference it is easy to see the difference in how they fit. Pic 4 is all the new parts in the kit. The rear cover, 4 screws and the diaphragm are assembled off the compass. The compass is then filled with fluid and the back/diaphragm assembly is put on loosely. Recessed side towards the inside of the compass. Pic 5 is the compass assembled in a new 2 cup measuring cup full of compass fluid. move it around and shake out the bubbles. This time it took 2 tries to get all the air out. Tightening the rear cover while submerged. Pic 6 is the old parts note the notch the screwdriver is pointed at. Once all the air is out and all the screws are tight you must cut this notch in the edge of the diaphragm so the wire to the light can hide while the cover is put on. Note how the straight sides of the front gaskets are different lengths. Black gasket goes beneath the glass and the cork one goes on top. Pic 6 is ready to mount back in the plane. No waterline inside. Total time 3 minutes each to mount and dismount in the plane. Plus about 45 minutes to repair the unit.

This is a repeat of a similar thread from last week. The reason Lycoming wants us to preheat is to eliminate the possibility that the parts don't change tolerances cold causing the engine to bind. Air cooled engines running tolerances change dramatically from cold to hot. The heating of the oil is a byproduct of the reason to preheat. Heated oil is nice as it allows easier starts due to quicker cranking. If an engine is cold enough the case can shrink so tightly around the crank that there is no clearance. No clearance no oil no oil scuffed bearings. This is the engine damage we avoid with preheat.

Read my previous post. I use a plug in heater for a minimum of 8 hours. This is about blowing hot air in the LOWER cowl flap, not the oil door. The recommendation from Lycoming starts lower than what I do. Any time it is below freezing I recommend pre heat. When I need to go somewhere early and expect cold I lug a generator out to the plane the night before and plug in the Tanis. If it feels cold on the head I will also use the propane heater. Some nights when it gets below 0 the engine still feels cold even with the Tanis. To fully heat a cold (o degree) engine with hot air takes 100,000 BTU propane heat at least 30 minutes, preferably more. The point is: It never really does get cold there in California. A hair dryer is a waste of time. These type of recommendations are at best misleading. But you are right it is 1/20 the heat needed not the 1/100 I stated. With a blanket and 8 hours a hair drier could work in an emergency. I doubt a hair drier is rated for 8 hours of continuous use. Find a real solution. 15 minutes from a hair drier is not a solution. Spending too much money is not the solution either. There are ways to spend $1000 to have preheat. I bought a heater and a vent pipe reducer from Home Depot. I power it from my car battery with a small inverter. I use a 5 foot section of scat tube to run it in the lower cowl. For under $150 I have a heater that I have used for over 15 years.

This may make you feel better when it is between 30 and 40 degrees but it is a waste of time. Purely a placebo. When it gets cold, and your record cold for today of +29 does not count, you need a lot more heat and for a much longer time. You are blowing less than 1000 BTUs where a proper heater is over 100,000 BTUs. When it is COLD you need a real heater. A little hair dryer is not a engine pre heater. The average low in El Dorado hills in the coldest month is 38. Most record lows are in the 20s. In a hanger you will never be cold enough to preheat. A plane parket outside in below 0 temperature will need close to an hour of heat from a 100,000 BTU heater to get up to you record cold. If you need heat this wont help. If this helped you didn't need it. Pre heating a cold engine is a serious thing, Don't trivialize it with a hair dryer.

Posted Yesterday, 02:00 AM mooniac58, on 27 November 2012 - 08:37 PM, said: I did a lot of research on this before and my understanding is that the general misconception is that the concern is oil being too cold, but with modern synthetic muti-grade oils this is not really the case - however the real concern is the different expansion/contraction rates of the steel and aluminum parts in our engines. "I would disagree with this, any type of oil is going to get viscous when it gets cold. Pumping that sludge through the engine, oil cooler, prop governor, etc. isn't a good thing. I agree with Piloto which is unless the oil is loose on the dipstick you probably aren't doing your engine a lot of favors by trying to start it". This opinion incorrect. The original post is correct. The issue IS dissimilar expansion rate of different metals. Thinned/warmed oil is an indication that the engine is warm but it is not the point of the warming. Just a good byproduct of it. If it were just oil viscosity different oil would fix it. It is a metals fit/expansion issue. A good preheater has multiple heat points to evenly heat the block/cylinders/pistons. A single point oil heater is not used because it is not why we pre heat. In a car preheating the oil IS adequate because of the differences in how the engines are made.

The threads are not the seal in this application like when tapered threads are used. In tapered pipe threads sealant is used in most applications. When line are of the flared line fitting type there is a metal to metal seal and sealant of any kind is worthless and teflon tape is hazardous. The lines in a brake system in cars are this type, never use teflon tape. The lines in car fuel injection systems also use metal to metal contact to seal. If it is not house plumbing dont use teflon tape!!!! I have seen where idiots have used teflon tape to seal water temp sensors. But wait it insulates the connection and defeats the purpose of the sensor. Any one that would use teflon tape in the situation mentioned simply does not understand what they are doing. There is a difference between a parts changer and a mechanic. Same difference as that between "trainable" and "teachable". A monkey can be trained to repeat motions without knowing why. If you are taught to understand why and how you then can understand what you are doing. Most APs are trained monkeys, hopefully they work under the guidance of an IA that has been taught to understand what is being done.

I own a car repair shop, have for over 31 years. My policy is: I charge for the correct repair at the price is would have been if I was perfect. The other day a customer brought in his daughters new to her 185000 mile Xterra. The lifters were very noisy. Customer ask for and got the lifters replaced. Noise was still there. With the rocker assembly off prior to reassembly I had my mechanic crank over the engine so I could see oil come out of the passagway on both heads. Second time apart no oil to where I saw it before. Pulled the heads and found the oil port to the left head plugged with carbon. (CHANGE YOUR OIL) I used a small dril in my fingers to open up the hole then flushed back and forth between both banks before reassembling the vehicle. Lifters paid 5 hours head gaskets paid 12 hours plus some time to clean out ports. Customer paid 13 hours, the lifter labor was fogiven. To charge for "learning" is THEFT dont pay it, that only encourages stupidity.

325 mil cash less taxes. The news did a bit here. Not a good idea. The 500 is if recieved over 30 years. If you covered every number and IF you were the only winner you would only lose 25 million. Worst gambling odds any where. It is a tax on the mathematicly challenged. This week I am challenged. $200,000,000 after taxes could buy a nice Rocket and gas to run it, for starters.

When I sold my Rocket to a guy from San Francisco he needed to take delivery out of state for sales tax reasons. We flew together from Stockton to North Las Vegas. He was left seat. Landing in Vegas there was quite a cross wind. At about 30' he panicked and said "Your plane" I got it down a little crooked and he hit the brakes to "steer it" straight. His previous plane had a castering nose wheel and was steered with the brakes. On the ground he started to walk away unaware and I stopped him and showed him the cords on a new tire. At that point he tried to blame me for the damaged tire. I had to show him the lack of brake pedals on the right side before he took responsibility.

There is a BIG difference between modern liquid cooled auto engines and our antiquated air cooled engines. Running clearances can get too tight cold and cause scuffing inside our engines. No comparison at all. Do not justify abusing your plane engine just cause car engines are OK with that kind of use. I have the bands and pads type of heater. It gets turned on the night before a flight. I also have a heater like Yves G showed. 30-45 minets before the start can't hurt. Kind of a belt and suspender type of approach. I preheat any time it dropps below freezing. I cant always get the Tanis plugged in the night before, 8 hour minimum. I can always wait for my propane heater. For me plugging in means leaving a generator running, there is no 120v where I park.

My favorite here in Denver landing KAPA. Coming in from the southwest on the LARKS arrival min crossing altitude is 14400. From there to PAYDD the min drops only to 13800. At that point they COULD start you down and vector for CASSE (NDB,LOM) and 8000 but they never do. The LARKS arrival crosses inside CASSE and they usually keep you high until they hand you off 5000' high and close to CASSE. They should just say "decend and maintain 11000 expect the slam dunk to the ILS 35 right" and be honest about what you are going to get. Sometimes it is easier and safer to simply call the miss soon after being cleared way high and fast for the approach. Once cleared you can desend to 9000 cross the inner marker then call the miss and turn right direct CASSE. At that point you can fly a stabilized approach. It seems the problem here is center holds on to you too long and too high. That then makes a mess for you and approach. Center acts like you are headed for the Falcon VOR and the DEN airport but approach doesn't want you anywhere near there.

This trip requires a turbo. Anything else will be a disappointment. I had a Rocket before, It would be ideal for this trip. In an attempt to save money I now own a MSE. It is now for sale because it is inadequate to use in and over the mountains. From Denver east the J is a great plane. From Denver west the J simply does not cut it. 150 kts is optimistic at 12,000 but at under 9 gph it is cheap. The Rocket I had exceeded book at every altitude. Conrad did not fudge the numbers, check the Rocket website for them. With long range tanks non stop is easy either direction. I used 200 kts 20gph to flight plan. Range can be extended considerably by running 55% instead of 75%. I did not have TKS and never missed it. Ice in the dry west is different than in the humid east. Because of the loss of speed and usefull I will not look for TKS in my next Rocket. The big advantage of the Rocket is more than just pure speed. It is the ability to climb quickly. I have seen 1500 fpm @ 26,000 light and over 1000 fpm there at gross. About oxygen and children it is different for each one. My youngest daughter who I began flying with us when she was three fought wearing it. The only time it would stay on her was while she slept. My youngest flew with us from birth. He wore a child size mask from day one without a problem. We live at 6000' and all feel comfortable 12,500 or less with out O2 except the youngest daughter. She is now 19 and will not fly without O2, she has motion issues and O2 helps. A stock K model is limited in what it can carry and how fast it can climb. A Rocket will carry more higher and faster than any other Mooney. Delta will ALWAYS cost less and be safer and more reliable than a personal airplane. In a private plane speed, safety and reliability go up with an exponential cost. For me a Rocket is the most Performance I could afford. Though I could spend more and get less performance. In aviation everything is a trade off there is no perfect solution for everyone. 200 hours a year in a Rocket would cost $35,000 or more. Upgrades and special toys extra. This figure assumes a paid for airplane and does not consider the " loss" of income from not using the airplanes value to earn more. Airplanes are expensive toys. If you can afford the expense there is nothing like the flexibility it will bring you. Who wants to ride the bus when you can have your own car? Especially now when just getting on board the bus is a two hour hassle. Even a cheap plane like my J would cost $25,000 a year. If these numbers don't work take the bus, save your marriage.

Dave this is not quite clear. There are 2 different K models the 231 and the 252. The conversion on the 231 Makes 2 changes #1 it adds a second battery and moves both batteries to a new shelf in the tailcone. This change doubles the electrical reserve and counters the additional weight of the larger engine. #2 The Rocket uses a different alternator, the one that comes on the TSIO-520NB. The 231 Rocket remains 12 volt. The 252 does lose the backup alternator, as the TSI520 has no pad for it, but gains the second battery and battery location. The 252 remains 24 volt but uses a different alternator to match the engine. The 231 retains the manual cowl flap upon conversion while the 252 retains the electric version it came with, no changes to either. There are NO aerodynamic changes made to either by Rocket. The speed cleanup Mooney did to the 252 can be added by others. Mod Works added those bits to my Rocket when it was painted. The Rocket generally is the same in most areas for maintenance and should cost no more than the stock K it came from. The differences I have seen are: Less engine work needed and the engine lasts longer. No turbo work between OH on the larger but slower spinning Rocket turbo. If run on the hot side the Rocket may require exhaust system repair more often than the 231. I know that the Rocket TBO is 1600 while the stock Ks are 1800. In reality a Rocket is much more likely to reach 2000 than a 231 is to reach 1800. The 252 is as likely to reach it's TBO of 1800 as the Rocket is to reach 2000. The reason there is no place for a second alternator is the same reason that there is a fully feathering prop. The engine is a "twin" engine from the Cessna 340. The backup alternator was on the "other" engine. I have heard that if the avionics were to be all electric and the vacuum system removed an alternator could be added in it's place. If any out there know either way for sure please chime in.

I believe he passed or at least retired. He was a Corsair pilot in WW11 and was getting quite old last I saw him. We met at Rocket in 95 and worked Fun and Sun and Oshkosh together in 96 he did help sell my Rocket in 2003. 4 years ago when I was looking to buy I contacted him and he did not remember me. I have not been able to contact him since.