2008 Ovation - How the first annual went

[Ed de C.]

Good evening folks – I thought I’d post some notes related to my first annual on my 2008 Ovation completed a couple of weeks ago.  Might be useful for somebody.

The backstory is that I purchased and imported this airplane a year ago from Canada.  Some of you may know that the import process essentially requires an annual inspection be done at the time of import so that the DAR (inspector) will agree to give the plane a new US airworthiness certificate.  In my case, this was done right after a pre-buy occurred and I agreed to buy the plane.  So, I guess technically this is my second annual.

Early on, I found a shop on my home field at Pontiac, Michigan and began working with them on some squawks and improvements.  This shop is locally known to be thorough.  My better decisions were to add the LHS landing system (love it) and GAMI injectors (can lean now to 100 LOP with no roughness).  My new Whelen LED taxi and landing lights are fabulous. My mistakes included switching to CIES fuel senders when simply overhauling a troublesome factory sender would have done the job and factory accuracy was fine.  That cost me $8k in parts and (lots of) labor.  Fortunately, we have the CIES calibration dialed in well enough finally.  I also had the shop do a couple of oil changes and had them troubleshoot (and IRAN) much of the fuel system to chase down some fuel flow anomalies.  After all that, I figured the official annual would be “a walk in the park”. 

My report to the shop when I dropped off the plane for annual was mainly “just sort out the fuel senders”.  Well, maybe I had a couple of additional items: 

1) the EGT prob in the collector driving the EGT gage on the engine summary display was inop.  This M20R chooses this 7^th probe for the engine summary, whereas the detailed engine page shows the standard 6 EGT probes.  The SAVVY data analysis calls this the TIT probe (M20R is normally aspirated). 

2) Landing gear feels wobbly at high speed on landing. 

3) The B/C standby alternator seems to be not charging as strongly as it once did (voltage at a given RPM, flashing low volts stays on) and it shows 29.9V at 2,500 rpm in flight (seems high).

4) The main alternator emits a distinct whine on the ground, not audible in the air. 

5) The Stormscope displays spurious signals at the 12 o-clock and 6 o-clock positions.

6) Check the fluids and top off… (O2 and TKS)

I like to hang out at the shop when my plane is there to watch and learn.  I bring enough doughnuts to buy that access.  The morning after I dropped off the plane, I got the bad news from the assigned A/P: “Hey Ed, we found something on the engine mount.  It almost certainly means we’ll have to pull the engine and send the mount out for repair.”  Boy, that sounded expensive and time consuming.  Sure enough, the engine isolator on the front left side had a heat shield that was contacting one of the mount tubes and had rubbed a slot into the tube.  Evidently, there’s a certain amount of section reduction allowed, and this exceeded that.  The shop owner explained to me that the 3 options were to a) find a new mount, b) send the mount to a turn-key repair shop, 3) use the services of his local certified welder to patch the spot.  I looked at the mount and the groove and said “I’m a recovering mechanical engineer.  That structure there is plenty over-built to handle the loads.  A patch weld is more than fine.”  Well, the estimate for even that was $8k.  One guy sand blasts the paint off, another welds the patch, a 3^rd paints it.  Then 40 hours of labor to take everything off and put it back on again. 

Sadly, my pre-buy photos showed this problem existed at least as far back as the pre-buy a year ago.  Likely it was an installation error on the part of the shop that installed the overhauled engine 2 years ago.  I also noted another weld on the engine mount done some time in the past.  Seems this is not an uncommon occurrence.  Lesson to all of us:  have your pre-buy A/P check the engine mount carefully.  Fortunately, the engine went back on with no glitches and 8 hours of flying indicate it has never run better.  Lesson:  pre-buys catch a lot, but they don’t catch everything. 

The rest of the annual involved a fairly long list of minor squawks and paperwork.  All told, it came in at $20k, or about 5% of the purchase price of the airplane.  It took 7 weeks.  All agree that this 2008 Ovation specimen is very clean, a testament to the Canadian climate and quality of prior maintenance.  It could have been worse.  The lesson here oft-repeated: your first annual is painful.  The SAVVY tech advised me through the process that the quote and invoice were reasonable for the work performed.

Regarding my original squawks above, we solved the EGT problem with a new probe.  Strangely, 2 of the other probes proved inop on the runup, but cured themselves later during a test flight.  The wobbly landing gear was addressed with new bolts in the nose gear assembly.  The B/C alternator was actually performing normally at 30V according to the service manual (and by that point I was fine to “defer”.)  We left the main alternator whine alone for now.  The Stormscope was deferred since I realized I needed to do some of my own troubleshooting (turns out the screen is clear when the strobes are turned off, so that’s where we’ll focus at some point.)  The TKS panels all wetted out normally. 

Now, the plane is just about squawk free.  I get an intermittent “GPS1 needs service” alert on the G1000, and I still have the alternator whine and stormscope noise to address.  We’ll de-cowl at the next oil change and make sure all is good in the engine compartment. 

Best,

Ed

[mike_elliott]

Great write up Ed. Thanks. I have seen the g1000 error occasionally and *believe* it is caused by excessive resistance in the connection of the unit to the radio rack. Those itty bitty connector pins can easily be bent so care should be heeded when cleaning.

I have heard a few shops cure the alt noise with a capacitor or replacing ignition leads

im surprised Clarence if he was the Canadian maintainer, missed the heat shield contacting the mount issue. He is anal about details like that

[MarkD34M]

Ed:  

I have an Ovation1 and the whine you refer to may be your rotating beacon. Next time you are in the plane and start up, try turning off the beacon and see if the noise goes away?

Mark

[NickG]

Ed, I like to negotiate a fixed price for the inspection, oil change and routine stuff. Obviously repair items not in the negotiated bucket that arise out of the inspection are extra.