pinerunner

No surprise there. He was at 2500".

21 inches manifold pressure is a pretty low power setting.

For me it will be between option 1 (me and the A&P) and option 3 (Wetwingologists). I've been around airplanes most of my life, scraped a lot of paint, bucked a lot of rivets, and now have a chemistry degree. So sealing polymers with their two part mixtures and kind of nasty removal products don't scare me off. Don Maxwell has a great page where he describes leak finding using a vacuum cleaner to pull a SMALL negative pressure on the fuel compartment (multiply the inches to get the cross-sectional area in your fuel compartment and you should realize what a few extra pounds per square inch might do to your wing). The mechanic who does my inspections told me I must be on drugs when I discussed it with him and now I think he's actually right. Aviation is like a drug to me and I'm almost as happy working on my plane as flying it. If you count my hours researching it and then convincing my A and P and then if he charges me for HIS time reading up on it (I don't think most mechanics have done wet wing reseals) maybe Option 3 becomes cost effective. Wetwingologists have a great reputation and if you mention them when you go to sell your Mooney some day I think it helps the plane move better. I wouldn't go with bladders cause I'd rather have it the way Mooney made it in the first place. Having it sealed by a lesser known shop for less $$$ may be OK but could turn into a lot of aggravation; if you go that route try to go where someone else from Mooneyspace has had a good experience. Unless you're addicted to the fun of working on your own plane and have the mechanic to back you up I'd go with Option 3.

This post gets me mad. I'd almost condone shooting someone stealing gas from a plane if you could get away with it. They used to hang horse thieves cause leaving some guy out in the dessert without his ride could be condeming him to a slow death. My wife and I once had someone steal our heating oil when we were first married and lived in a little trailer; we woke up freezing and had a bunch of pipes burst. Big mess. I always do a complete preflight at the beginning of the day and check the tanks when refueling. It never occurred to me that someone might siphon off gas, silly me. I'm lucky I think to be at a fairly active GA airport. The hangar is locked and the airport manager/mechanic lives 200 feet from the hangars so not a good place sneak in and do dirty crap.

I like my EI UBG-16 just fine. Its inflight capabilities are probably less impressive but I find them to be sufficient. What I like best is the ability to download all the data in CSV format so it can then be looked at easily with excel or some other spreadsheet. I got it with a fuel flow sensor added in. I've got a bunch of extra channels that I'm considering using but CHT's, EGT's, and fuel flow are the ones I knew I needed up front. Takeoff is the most critical time and I can't be looking at it then so so that's one reason why I like to be able to look at the data and judge how I've been treating her. Also being able to compare current mag checks with earlier ones is helpful. Busch has a vid that mentions troubleshooting valves by looking for a periodic pulse in the EGT's. I can't do that because mine is set with too slow a data rate in the burst mode. I'm going to have that reset next annual. The folks at EI have been very responsive to the couple of problems I had. Very satisfied.

Whoa!! You've got friends in high places! Put up a sign and invite them over for coffee or maybe a tailgate party when the Broncos are playing.

Small lottery: Cessna 180 to put on floats wheels or skis. Plus Mooney M20J for long cross country's. BIgger lottery: Beaver so and One of the newer super Mooneys I guess. Tiny lottery: WAAS GPS upgrades to my M20E and money leftover to FLY it a bunch.

One more note on what i've observed with my desicator plugs (in spark plug holes). They don't go from blue to pink in the same amount of time. The difference must be due to two of the cylinders having either an exhaust valve or an intake valve open giving a direct line to the outside. I've got to plug those holes. Unfortunately I work two states away from home and return to a list of chores made up by my wife and the result is small quick jobs on the plane tend to get left. Duct tape works but is a pain to take off. I work with all kinds of tubing, plumbing, and fittings in the laboratory (analytical chemist LC/MS) so I pretty much know what I'd like to create but I don't know where to get the materials to make it.

I've got my preheater (Reiff) set up to to come on for a couple hours in the morning, when the dew is forming (we're near a river). I heard from our A&P/Inspector that during an overhaul of an engine where they had left the preheater on he had seen more corrosion than normal. That bothered me and one thing occurred to me; that aluminum propeller out front is like a big radiator. So while the crankcase and cylinders are warming up anything attached directly to the propeller (ie. the crankshaft) would lag behind at a lower temperature. Water vapor will tend to condense on the the coolest thing available. My mechanic friend answered that in fact he had seen the most corrosion on and around the front of the crankshaft. So now I'm thinking of putting a blanket over the whole front including the prop and maybe giving the prop just a few watts with heating tape during dew time. I'm buying more desicant and rigging a bag up the exhaust and at the end of the crankcase vent. I think I'll also remove the intake filter and replace it with plastic and a mesh bag of desicant. Guess I'll need to seal the intake manifold vent too. I can't wait to catch up on a couple debts and get my daughter to pay her own college loans so I can get out of "preservation mode" and start flying again. I'm really appreciating this thread.

That's what she said!

Cessna landing gear is pretty rugged. So is the old Piper Cherokee I think and very wide. Starting in these makes sense to me. Rent to solo at least and maybe even to PPL. You don't don't want to be grounded dealing wih "1st-year squawks" when you're trying to do x-countrys and prepare for the check ride. That would drive me nuts.

My instructor has this fancy radiophone that he laid on the floor when I wasn't looking the first time we flew together. I hit it a few times with the J-bar before I sorted it out and handed it to him with a few extra scratches.

For those who just can't have too many engine monitor inputs there's the Oximeter for your bike.

I think the M20E is great for the purpose you descibe. I got mine with with 350 hrs total and a commercial rating but no recent time and still only paid a little over $1000 for my insurance. It came down to $800 a year the next year since I had put on 50+hrs in the first year. They'll probably charge you a lot for the first years insurance but after the first 100 hrs in it and getting your instrument rating it'll come down to a more reasonable fee. Make sure you have plenty of cash tucked away for maintenance issues. Often quite a few for the first year. Be ready to fly it a lot to make it worthwhile.

Mike Busch has a pretty good vid where he explains how to use engine monitor data to judge the health of the exhaust valves. You need to collect the data at a pretty fast rate. At Savy Aviator website I think it was the vid specifically on engine monitors. Basically if you see a repeating pattern in the EGT data with a period of about a minute you've got a problem.

I use the storage/pickling oil and desicator plugs which you can purchase fairly inexpensively. They turn color blue to pink when they have absorbed all the moisture they can hold and therefore stop working. I have to take them out every 2-3 weeks and bake them (the silica beads inside, not the plastic) to get rid of the adsorbed moisture and rejuvenate them. So they wouldn't do the job just sitting and left for a year. An engine dehumidifier would be a great thing to have. Its pretty humid where I live and stuff left just sitting outside tends to rust.

Curtis Air in Pittsfield Maine does good work. They work on a wide variety of planes of all vintages including Beechcraft and a couple Mooneys. I know one Beech D-18 comes there from out of state because they like the thoroughness of their work.

This really got to me. What a stupid way to crash. I've felt for a while now that automated technology was dumbing down the endusers. For instance computer users who only use icons and never learn an actual command. I a lot of my friends at work (research scientists) think I'm odd for ever bothering with the command line on our computers and for writing simple scripts, but it gives me more control and I feel more sure of whats actually going on. I was chatting with a local pilot the other day who turned out to be an airline pilot and he was pretty disgusted with what he saw in the industry. Sounds like they were passing over more highly qualified applicants to get a new generation of copilots that they could start off cheap and train as they pleased. And I've got a friend with loads of time flying heavy transport for the Air National Guard who's finding it hard to get the job he'd like with FedEx. He ought to be a no-brainer but could it be he's OVER-qualified.

I guess I've been lucky. I haven't run into any of these gougers flying around in Maine or on my trip bringing the Mooney back from S.Carolina. I do use Airnav to find the best gas prices.

I get that a bit in my E. I think all the short bodied Mooneys do it a bit.

I think its the same up front. It's the back seat that suffers.

Sounds like a challenge. Speed control will be the key. You can forward slip an M20E if you find you're a little high; the flaps don't slow you much. I'd demand ideal conditions before I'd try it and then practice stalls first with the same heavy load and shoot for 1.3 times the stall speed. Also I'd practice at a bigger airport to see what the plane and I am really capable of at those loads. Not all short fields are equally easy. Land formations can induce some weird air currents near the end of the runway. I've always hated "tabletop" airports that are on the flat top of a hill. Usually a downdraft that you have to fight on short final and then it turns into a headwind once you're over the runway so you float. If you slow down too much on final you'd stall and crash hard into the side of the hill. On the other hand a short strip in the middle of cornfields with ideal approachs and it could be a nonevent. What's this field like? Maybe you could land nearby and ferry your passengers in one at a time. I think I'd try this strange field (to me) out solo first loaded light and with slower approach speed (judged by the change in stall speed). Then I'd have a better idea what this place was going to throw at me. I don't have an AOA indicator but for this I think it would be very welcome. The shortest I've been into was 2400' with one other passenger and half fuel in my 64 M20E. That wasn't a problem using about 70-75 MPH (older indicator) final approach speed.

Another great article. At first I was going to say that I was happy to see another expert like Busch, then I saw his name at the bottom. It does make it clear that we have a lot of tools these days to help make good decisions. We just need to put them to work. I really liked N201MKTurbo's advice that pulling three cylinders and a few accessories gives good cheap access to the interior if you're feeling antsy about the state of your engine. Of course if you go past TBO you've got to be ready to do the big overhaul at some point and be sure you don't wait to long. However, if you think that's not already the case just because you HAVEN'T gone past TBO then you're a fool. Hope I didn't hurt any feelings.

We should keep in mind that the amphib pontoon wheels-down scenario is the worst possible case. The wheels are such a long distance below the CG making for a long moment arm. A C-172 landplane might make out a little better. For us its obviously wheels up in a water landing.