jetdriven

There’s got to be some reason why the Bonanza proficiency clinics and the Mooney safety foundation clinics don’t do them.

That’s a whole problem going up to Vermont for example, a mooney really isn’t the kind of plane to be flying up there if you’re gonna do it IFR and the temperature is below freezing. You start getting ice there’s literally nowhere to go for 100 miles. One person on this board tried, with near- disastrous results.

Somebody cut the fuel gauge arms to be between 7/8” and 2” shorter on our plane whatever they installed the bladders I guess to get the fuel gauge just to read accurately on full or empty. The floor of the bladder is about 3/4 of an inch or maybe 1 inch above the bottom of the actual original tank.

We fly that way a bunch going up to Vermont, and if you just go about 15 or 20 miles East of there you're over the Hudson River Valley, and there's tons of airports and the terrain is far lower. It's even not much that further out of the way.

They have two versions, a 1 Rpm and a 2 Rpm version. If you buy the 2 Rpm version it’s going to be 1300 bucks, and then when you find out that the airflow pushes the cowl flaps open in cruise then you get to buy the 1 Rpm version and pay another 1300 bucks because the first one is not returnable.

We probably put 300 hours on the Garmin EIS, and when you install the GEA 24B there's no wild fuel pressure fluctuation in fact there's no fluctuation at all. The latest install had a GEA24 and it has no fluctuation, the software has been updated. The Garmin EIS also has a superior leaning algorithm, and it even gives you the GAMI spread and which cylinder peaks first and last and which fuel flow. It's also a touchscreen it also displays other pages such as a summary page that shows Max Rpm, Max oil temp and Max CHT, including peak cooling rate. You can also place tick marks in different areas, including the normal gauge value. And if you have a 275 MFD, you can display your NAV2 on that you can also display the EGT page on that full-time. Or traffic, weather, terrain. etc.

For the same money, the GI275 EIS is better.

Prekote is supposed to replace the acid etch and alodine . Where it’s really valuable is magnesium. They used to sell a chemical called Magnadyne, which was like Alodine for magnesium. But it hasn’t been made in years, and alodine is for aluminum. It doesn’t work on magnesium. Paint shops either don’t know this or pretend it doesn’t matter. But it’s a recipe for filiform corrosion for magnesium. However, Prekote seems to hold up for a decade, as the wheels on my plane have been painted that long.

We’ve been stripping airplanes for 90 years now. The newest stripper is actually a benzyl alcohol/peroxide stripper and when you rinse it with water it neutralizes it. And then when you put acid on there, it removes the rest of it. And then you rinse that off and then you alodine it And as long as everything is rinsed properly, you don’t get filiform corrosion. It’s fine. It’s industry standard. I’ve done a lot of small parts with prekote but I haven’t done a whole plane, but I think that’s probably fine too and it’s a lot less toxic.

Because it’s been on there for 30 or 40 years.

To do it right you need to strip it and acid etch it and alodine it and then prime it with some epoxy primer and then paint it. Think about this, if you’re gonna scuff it and paint over what’s already there, you’re betting that’s gonna hold onto the metal but that paint job may be 30 years old. The paint shop is not going to warranty it. If you don’t wet sand the previous stripes, you will see those through the new top coat. And if you’re gonna spend enough time to knock all the edges off the stripes, that costs real money too l…it comes out of the savings that you saved from not stripping it. And how much are you really saving? Two or 3K? Is it really worth it?

Locking it forces you to close it, but has anybody ever had an unlocked baggage door open that was actually closed?

Actually, the UK pilot, his baggage door handle was closed flat, and likely locked, but whoever was maintaining the airplane had the hitch pin underneath of the interior emergency release, instead of on top of it. It actutally forces it unlocked. His aircraft actually did not conform to the type certificate and it was not airworthy because of that. Theres actually an AD on those baggage door mechanisms.

Maybe if it’s on an engine stand, you can R&R all cylinders in 8 hours but on the plane by the time we take the baffling and everything else apart it’s quite a bit more than that. And then you still have to end up honing the cylinders and putting new rings on it and you gotta file fit the rings to the right end gap and then you still got to check the dry tappet clearance too. Then reassemble the whole airplane with the exhaust, the induction tubes, the baffling, spark, plug leads, plugs, valve train, and everything else.

But the newest ones now are some kind of phosphor bronze again. I don’t know if they’re the same alloy as the small end rod bushing but they’re not aluminum.