aviatoreb

RAAM. R&R at Weber.

...I miss my plane! They are promising early August. Is it bad if I wish July away? :-O Well it should be a kick ass new engine for my old bird.

How long is it taking yours?

Hi LevelWing, I went through something comparable about 10 years ago on my M20K Rocket. I sent my airplane to Wilmar for a tank reseal (preemptive since the tanks were 30 years old original seals and it was a precursor step to new paint and I just didnt want to deal with tanks giving away on a new paint job). Well once one tank was stripped of the sealant it was found that there was corrosion on a wing spar under the sealant. You couldnt find that without stripping the sealant in the fuel tank under the fuel under the sealant, so it wasnt any APs fault who signed it off for annual. Well that was very depressing. I had it repaired by Dave at airmods in NJ, https://www.airmodsflightcenter.com. he is a magician. He was able to do the operation without entirely removing the wing but separating the wing and lifting the wing and plane apart but still in place. It took about 9 months and about 20k+. 10 years on I am glad I did it that way. I had also considered replacing the wing but that was also very expensive - more expensive when it came to finding a tip top wing and shipping it before the replacement phase of labor. I was going to paint anyway but you would want to paint as well. So it can be done, but is this plane either worth it financially, or sufficiently dear to you that you are willing to bite the bullet if it is not financially sensible? Remember if everything else is customized as you wish and you are all caught up on all the other maintenance things, there is some financial value there since buying another airplane always starts with inheriting someone else's headache to bring it up to your own standards.

Aviatoreb here reporting for duty!

They used to have a reasonably nice app that I think ran at least through internet browser for flight planning - but that seems to have gone away years ago.

Beautiful!

Exactly - we shouldnt fly without it - but no - no difference in normal opps but be aware it is there to shape the stall characteristics and that is unbalanced.

Oh what a pain. I lost one in flight a decade ago - I was without one for like 6 months since there were none in the supply chain at any price and I forgot how much it was but it was very very expensive. I kept browsing eBay for like 2 years after I had replaced it and managed to get an extra at an excellent price from a salvage plane which was not necessarily selling that part. But I made an offer and they sent it.

I’m glad I did the major overhaul - my crank turned out to be in sufficiently poor shape they replaced it and my engine case needed some work so a top would not be enough.

OMG! Me too! What's wrong with us?!!

Exactly. Very unwise! I do it out of love for it - and addiction... :-O

Well I tell you what - I just got my invoice - and it's eye watering. I wonder if my eye would have fallen out if that had been hit with another 90% on some of the items.

I have an overhaul almost done at RAM late this month. I wonder if engine overhauls will become a lot more expensive - where are overhaul parts produced?

That's quite a story! Ever seen this gag picture?

Wow - you flew in 35kts at 90 degrees?

But if you do that - where will you put your cigar ashes???!!!

Love the poetic phrasing. In fact, et's offer a Mooneyspace prize to the best Haiku about good smooth peaceful confident landings to tell to ourselves while landing.

Exactly - I dont actually compute with the trig functions to two decimal places of accuracy on an irrational number when I am flying. My main point is I sometimes get the feeling that some people speak of cross wind across the runway that is a fierce 30 knots and they land it but actually its 45 degrees off perpendicular so they didnt really land a 30 knot cross wind and then they tell themselves it was fine and then another time it really is 30 degrees 90 degrees off and they are expecting it to be the same relying on mistaken math.

Just a thought - It's my guess that most of the wear on our donuts occurs in the long stretches of time the airplane is sitting - on its donuts - sitting in our hangars. Even say an airplane that is flying a lot - say 10 hours a week - that's a lot by anyone's standard except for maybe a part 135. There are 168 hours in a week. If it flies 10 hours - then it is just sitting there on the ground on the donuts 158 hours a year. That's 94% of the time. For most of us, it sits on the ground, on the donuts, a lot more than that. What if in our hangars we lift the weight off the donuts? Jack the plane up - just a bit - say relieve a thousand pounds, or maybe 1500lbs worth, but still touching the ground? As a standard hangar day to day storage idea. I bet this would dramatically extend the life of donuts. Maybe to the point that we would never have to replace them in a 20 or 40 year ownership lifetime? Im thinking of a new device. If we wanted to do this we could use our standard jacks, but maybe a special automatic jack that pumps in 500 or 750 lb automatically at each jack would do the trick and be easy to put on and off and less of a crisis of being so careful since the wheels would still be on the ground. Such a thing would be quick on and quick off to use on a daily/weekly basis.

Some are reporting the angle here, or implicitly doing so by reporting the wind direction and runway direction, but I want to remind just in case. I know a lot know but just in case, entertain this old math professor - 30kts at 60 degrees is a lot less than 30kts at 90 degrees. 30*sin(60)=25.98 which is a bit less than 30 if it were at 90 degrees and a lot more than 30 if it were at 45 degrees 30*sin(45)=21.21. So remember to pay attention to angle when considering. My personal absolute max is 20 degrees in the perpendicular component. So 30kts cross wind is ok if it's at 40 degrees. 30*sin(40)=19.28.

WOW - scary!

I wonder why. Rocket was an after thought mod but was purpose built.

Thanks very interesting Don, I bet you have flown in the rocket. Do you feel the 305hp is too much for that airframe? I am entirely used to it and like it but I do not have any other mooney time in a different mooney to contrast it to like you do. Anyway I like it a lot.

There is an interesting hybrid electric on their website too. I know what hybrid electric means in car - but in airplanes.... can it be setup differently. Suppose this engine likes to cruise at 130hp all day long. But we still want 225hp for short phases of flight like take off and landing - I could see the utility of hybrid electric where the average could be 130hp but electric is there and able to produce that 225hp for take off and landing phases. Can it do this?