{"id":4415,"date":"2025-06-21T13:44:17","date_gmt":"2025-06-21T21:44:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jasonbeaver.com\/rv7\/?p=4415"},"modified":"2025-06-21T13:44:17","modified_gmt":"2025-06-21T21:44:17","slug":"biggest-annual-to-date","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/jasonbeaver.com\/rv7\/2025\/06\/21\/biggest-annual-to-date\/","title":{"rendered":"Biggest Annual to Date"},"content":{"rendered":"

The plane was down for over a month with this annual. Part of that was work as we had our developer’s conference a couple of weeks ago and that’s always a busy time of the year. I’m also running my boss’ team while he’s out, so that’s taking up much more of my time. The other factor is that I addressed several more issues than I normally do during the annual.<\/p>\n

I spent the most time tackling several issues firewall forward. The first is that one of my upper exhaust mount support brackets broke. If you’ve been a long-time reader of this site, you might remember that I originally flattened and bent the stainless steel tubing (per instructions from Vetterman), but that broke and I replaced it with these steel brackets<\/a> made from 18 gauge mild steel. This lasted over 600 hours, but it was apparently still too thin.<\/p>\n

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I fabricated four new brackets out of 12 gauge steel which will likely last longer than the airplane. I replaced both upper brackets even though only one of them bad broken. I have two spares now in case the lower brackets ever crack. Fortunately, the broken bracket didn’t cause any additional damage.
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The oil dipstick tube was originally installed with a paper gasket that is notorious for leaking. It’s also been a minor irritation, but since the plane down for awhile and I needed to order some other things from Aircraft Spruce, I went ahead and ordered one of the Real Gasket RG-72059. Hopefully this will address the issue.<\/p>\n

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My engine has been sagging for some time. It has progressed to the point now that the alternator pulls is cutting a shallow groove in the lower cowl. I’d been putting it off because I expected it to be a pain, and boy was I right. This is the right side and access is reasonably good here. The left side though was a bear. I could barely see the nut behind all of the stuff in the way. To gain access, I ended up removing the #4 intake tube, disconnecting the mixture cable, and removing the mixture cable support bracket. Even with all of that out of the way, I could barely get my fingertips against the nut, and it was incredibly challenging to get any tool on it to loosen it. I eventually got it off though and the bolts slipped out easily.<\/p>\n

The spinner was down about 1\/4″, so my hope was that a single AN970-7 washer would be enough. It would be an enormous pain to have to install and remove these multiple times to fine tune the thickness of a shim. Fortunately, this worked out well. When I originally installed the engine mount bolts, I borrowed a friends bolt alignment bullet. I’m not sure where he got it, but it helped bring everything into alignment as we drove the bolts through. I didn’t have access to it anymore, so I whipped up a version on the lathe that worked pretty well.<\/p>\n

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You can see now that the spinner is nicely aligned with the cowling.<\/p>\n

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While I had the baggage wall out, I installed some expanding foam insulation in the bends to reduce the airflow from the tail. This should help a little bit with cabin temps at higher altitudes.<\/p>\n

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We recently added LEMO jacks to our Bonanza. I previously converted my Bose A20 headsets to LEMO connectors, and I’ve been using these adaptors in my RV. I originally installed my headphone jacks on the subpanel<\/a>. This kept the headphone jacks out of the way, but it makes working on them difficult as it requires crawling under the panel. I probably should have left myself a reasonable service loop of wires, but I was trying to keep the plane light and didn’t do that.<\/p>\n

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Out of curiosity, I disassembled the LEMO adapter and found out that the internal alignment pieces exactly matched the panel mount LEMO jacks that I’d purchased.<\/p>\n

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Even the rear shell threaded on correctly.<\/p>\n

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I realized that this meant I could continue to use my LEMO adapters if I simply replaced the LEMO end with the panel mount jack. The only modification I needed to make was to install a power wire onto the unused pin in the jack and route it out of the back of the connector.<\/p>\n

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This let me install the LEMO jacks on the panel. I wanted to install them in a location that was as out of the way as possible, and ended up choosing the far edges of the panel. Here’s the pilot’s side.<\/p>\n

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And here’s the copilot’s side.<\/p>\n

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There’s a good 1\/4″ of clearance from the cable to the gas struts that support the canopy<\/p>\n

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These can just stay plugged into my original headset jacks and can be unplugged someone ever wants to use their own headset without a LEMO connector.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The plane was down for over a month with this annual. Part of that was work as we had our developer’s conference a couple of weeks ago and that’s always a busy time of the year. I’m also running my boss’ team while he’s out, so that’s taking up much more of my time. The … Read More<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4415","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-maintenance"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/jasonbeaver.com\/rv7\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4415","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/jasonbeaver.com\/rv7\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/jasonbeaver.com\/rv7\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/jasonbeaver.com\/rv7\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/jasonbeaver.com\/rv7\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4415"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/jasonbeaver.com\/rv7\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4415\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4416,"href":"http:\/\/jasonbeaver.com\/rv7\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4415\/revisions\/4416"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/jasonbeaver.com\/rv7\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4415"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/jasonbeaver.com\/rv7\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4415"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/jasonbeaver.com\/rv7\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4415"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}