Airplane Owner Maintenance - By Dean Showalter

This is a good looking exhaust valve with a nice concentric appearance. However, the compression was very low at 8/80.

I lapped the valve, hoping it would improve the compression test resul…

Where are you RIGHT NOW in your aviation journey?

• Have you started flight training, but stalled out along the way?
• Did you finish that instrument rating?
• How about the commercial certificate, …

How long should the battery last in a small, piston-powered airplane?

That’s a great question, and we are talking about it in this week’s podcast episode.

Tune in to hear the story behind t…

I had an opportunity to fly in an Aerostar the other day… it was going to be a fairly long trip to the destination, with one fuel stop along the way.

As we climbed out of the Shenandoah Valley…

Here are the highlights you’ll find in this podcast episode:

• My latest assignment at Classic Aviation – Installing the freshly overhauled engine in a Cessna 172 that is almost complete after a…

But first… My friend and podcast listener, Chris Wieczorek, flew into SHD recently and we ate burgers for lunch. It was a win-win. I provided the ground transportation, and he bought lunch!

Happy new year friends!

In today’s podcast episode, you’ll hear about the following:

• The airplane I’m currently working on.
• My recent King Air trip to JFK, and the interesting approach we go…

Recently, Seth and I spent part of a weekend at a remote mountain cabin location, and we decided it would be a great time to record a conversation about the career changes both of us have made.

Happy Thanksgiving everyone!

I’ve been deer hunting with my daughter McKenzie this week, and so far, she got a button buck, and I got a doe… she’s trying to get a good supply of venison in her f…

A week and a half ago, I flew a Cessna 150 from KSHD to Hannah Field near Monterey, Virginia in Highland County. It was a Saturday morning coffee-and-donuts fly-in hosted by the owners of the privat…

In this podcast episode, I’m sharing my experience of going through the training course for a Type Rating in the King Air 350. FlyRight in Concord, North Carolina was definitely the best choice…

Listen to the audio for this episode to hear what Dean’s been up to recently, and why there have not been many podcast episodes in recent weeks.

I’m transitioning out of the maintenance shop and i…

Recently, I had the amazing opportunity to visit NAS Pax River, a United States naval air station located in St. Mary’s County, Maryland, on the Chesapeake Bay.

My friend, Trace Bowen, picked me u…

Have you ever seen one of these? It’s a SureFly Ignition Module, or “SIM” for short:

I recently had an opportunity to install one on an E33A Bonanza, so I thought I’d do a podcast episode abou…

You guys know I love out-of-the-ordinary things, and my recent flight review definitely qualifies as one of those!

First, my good friend and excellent flight instructor worked me over in the g…

I recently inspected a Piper Saratoga, and I found the following condition on the right exhaust collector:

Earlier this week, I sent this photo to my email subscribers and asked if they would …

Chris Saindon, a podcast listener and owner of a Cessna 172G, contacted me with a different, and important perspective that I had completely overlooked.

I recently told of a landing gear light i…

This was what happened recently in a Piper Seneca… and in this episode, we discuss why the alternator quit… it was something I totally was not expecting.

After verifying the field connections (pow…

This fuel injector line must have only been attached finger tight when the fuel injectors were reinstalled after cleaning. The engine ran fine at first, but all of a sudden during one engine run…

When an airplane engine is making a small amount of ferrous metal, but the evidence is not totally conclusive, the decision to tear it apart, or not, can be gut-wrenching.

Such was the case for th…