Well, the Bellanca survived another annual inspection. The transponder will probably need calibration before it passes inspection in two years, but it passed. No unexpected issues came up, which was a nice change. Taxing with the new alternator is great (charging the battery at idle? Weird!) and it works as well as the generator in flight. The new regulator is much better at holding constant voltage, which is not surprising.

No major squawks after the return to service flight, and the gyros work much better after the regulator was adjusted a bit higher after we found out how far off the suction gauge was pre-overhaul. The paperwork’s done, the bill’s paid, now time to fly!

N8861R goes in to AirTec for it’s annual inspection tomorrow. There are no major issues I’m aware of, so it should be a fairly standard inspection and hopefully not take too long.

As with every other year, I made a couple upgrades to the airplane already:

• Replaced the old, failing 35 amp generator and mechanical regulator with a Plane Power 70 amp alternator and solid-state regulator. In addition to more power in cruise flight (so more head room for avionics upgrades), the alternator can actually put out more power at idle than the generator could in cruise. So no more low voltage / discharge alarms on the EDM-900 during taxi! Oh, and a gain of 8 pounds of useful load helps, too.
• Replaced the engine control cables. The old throttle and prop cables were original and starting to look real bad. The mixture cable was in good shape, but had been replaced about a decade ago, but was not the right length (it looks like someone used a pre-made size, not the factory length).
• Returned the engine control cable mounting brackets to their (supposedly) original locations, which makes some of the tighter parts of the cowling fit a little bit better.
• Fixed (hopefully) the fluctuations in MAP pressure by installing a snubber in the manifold pressure line.
• Overhauled the suction gauge, which was of suspect accuracy

It’s also the year for pitot/static and transponder checks, which always makes me a bit nervous (altimeters and blind encoders aren’t cheap, and finding leaks in pitot or static lines sucks). The altimeter and blind encoder passed bench tests, so that’s one hurdle down.