jetdriven

It’s all about percentage of power and at 150+ miles per hour, it doesn’t matter what Rpm it is, at 15 inches, the airplane is pushing the prop. Once you get to 80 mph it’s the other way around.

The 15” limitation is for continuous operation and a momentary power setting that allows you to slow down is not continuous power setting. That said, slowing your plane down to 80 knots to lower the gear, you’re trading wear on the gear motor for wear on the engine because you’re going to be driving the engine with the prop and that’s more expensive than a gear motor actually. For what it’s worth I put the gear down at 153 miles an hour indicated all the time, but we have STC aftermarket lower gear doors which don’t seem to mind. It’s lower doors that curl and tear up not the upper ones. But if you lower it at some number around 130 or so, is probably fine for gear door wear too.

If you wanna stop the cowling for moving, and I mean stop it from moving a single millimeter, put the stopper block on the inside of the cowling on the upper part and put a piece of angled aluminum on the edge of the boot cowl and when those two pieces butt into each other it can’t move. Now for the bottom, Lasar sold this mod that was a little strap. it was just above the bottom of the cowling, with a nut plate on it, and you put a hole through that in a screw with a smooth shank on it. And then the entire cowl can’t move a single millimeter. Whenever we did all this work, we filed the back edge of the cowling with about a one and a half millimeter gap. And 10 years later, the paint still isn’t chipped and the gap is the same. The harder you clamp down on the cowling with fixed nut plates and short cam locks, the more it wears the holes. The metal in the fiberglass layup is a piece of .020” aluminum which slows it down, but it doesn’t stop it. The camlock’s job is to keep the cowling flush with the skin. The shear loads have to be absorbed by something made to hold shear loads, and a 3/8 in. Square of aluminum, riveted to the airframe, butting into a piece of fiberglass that’s the same size. It ain’t going nowhere in 1000 hours.

You can slow down the problem, but you can’t stop it because the grommets start to wear the holes in the cowling into an egg shape. The way you can stop it is to build a piece of fiberglass inside the cowling that is 1/4” high and contacts a piece of angled aluminum riveted to the inside of the boot cowl. And then it could take the shear load and the grommets can do their job by holding the cowling down.

Not necessarily, in the same spot on the curve, that’s true, but the leaner you get from peak, the slower the flame front and eventually power output will decline. Put into practice, 27 inches of manifold pressure at 8 gallons an hour is a certain percentage of power at 30 lean of peak, but if you shove more manifold pressure through it and then lean it back to the same fuel flow, it is now 100 lean of peak, and that won’t be the same horsepower at the crankshaft. You can see this with your airspeed. It’s because the efficiency is less because it’s actually too far down the backside of the peak. The peak power pulse of combustion occurs further down the cylinder because it’s burning slower.

But you also introduce 3 different failure points in the 3-step process. If you pull the key out you do Al that with one step

But you pull the switches up to put the placard on the dash then that turns the switches on. And actually, they should be locking bat toggle switches. The idea they put some cheap plastic switches on such an important piece of hardware, don’t think it’s all that great of an idea. And then they put the starter button with no shroud or guard on it and it actually sticks out beyond the flat surface of the switch. Again, it’s very easy to touch this panel and either hit the starter or turn off one or both magneto’s while you’re flying. Eventually, it’s going to happen, someone’s going to be flying at night and do one of those two things. We have two clients with these switch panels and although they look cool, they’re not as good.

That’s a lot of extra steps to have the convenience of having 3 switches vs a key

The higher the temperature, the more potential for corrosion, and the more water the air in the engine can hold. Just plug it in a few hours before you go fly otherwise, leave it cold.

Since the early 1990s, yes those things spall, and I agree with you that engines built built before that time are less susceptible to lifter spalling but in this case that is more than offset by the fact that the engine hasn't been apart in about 45 I'm years, that carries the to its own set of risks. In either case id be prepared to eat it as soon as buying, but you could run it and hope.

I don’t think Mike Bush’s corollary really applies to Lycoming 4 cylinders and lifter spalling anymore in todays reality. This board is riddled with stories of folks buying a plane and planning on running it past TBO to get later blown up with a $40,000 or $50,000 engine shop bill because the cam started eating itself. We did two last year in our shop, it happened to me when we bought our plane 14 years ago. There’s no signs of this letting up. And on the other end, a freshly overhauled engine is going to go for a premium as long as it was done by a rated shop because of the incredible cost and waiting time. If it takes 6 to 9 months to get an engine done, that’s another $7000 or $8000 worth of utilization that you’re spending right out of your pocket that you don’t get to use your airplane. We just bought a Cherokee 180 from a friend of a friend, and the first thing it’s getting is an engine. The one on it was done in 1992 and although it runs great, between lender problems and general buyer hesitance, it’s only flying one time, to our hanger to have it removed. Yes it is getting DLC lifters.

How is changing a switch of one part number for another part number a major change in type design? And also aren’t we allowed to substitute parts and materials for vintage aircraft? (all mooneys are vintage aircraft) I mean they have to be equal or better right but I can’t see how any of this is major.

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.