The joys of ownership

We had a lot of rain in Missouri and the grass runways at the farm were wet. With more rain in the forecast, there appeared to be a distinct possibility that the runways could be too soft to depart from, so we decided that I should move the plane to Lamar, which is a paved airport five miles away.

The preflight, runup and takeoff were all normal. At 400 AGL, the engine began to show distinct signs of poorer performance. I was able to maintain 400 AGL at 80 MPH and made it to LLU where there was a fair crosswind for the only runway. I did a straight-in approach, maintaining altitude until the last possible moment, then added 40 flaps and did a steep approach in for a crosswind landing on 03.

Diana and Tom contacted their mechanic, who turns out to be not only an excellent mechanic but also a great guy. He found seven fouled plugs and a stuck exhaust valve. Evidently leaning to RPM drop and then enrichening a quarter inch is not lean enough for this engine, so I'll lean to RPM drop and then richen the mixture just enough to smooth out (maybe 50 RPM). We'll see how that goes.

The flight over was an interesting lesson in "fly the plane, fly the plane, fly the plane". The 496 was handling the navigation and there was no time to communicate. I ran through a check of all of the expected items: carb heat first, which quickly proved not only to be not helpful but was stealing needed RPM. Primer, mags, mixture, fuel, etc. were all correct, which left "fly the plane". I learned quite a lot about my plane in those five minutes.

It's running better than ever now. :-)