: The purchase is for a _very_ good price.

What you are describing is almost completely the same situation as the plane
that we bought coming up on 4 years ago. It was a PA28-140 with a -180 engine in
it... only 5 hours since overhauled, but 8 years earlier. It didn't have an interior
or any avionics, but the price was really good.

We bought it anyway, and then discovered that not only was there no time on
the engine, it wasn't even broken in! It had chrome cylinders (notoriouly difficult
to break in), and I put 50 hours or so on it burning a quart every 4-5 hours or so.
There were two "soft" cylinders pulling it through. Between that and some "morning
sickness" and power losses indicating sticking valves, we pulled the jugs and had them
IRAN'd. I took a good look at the cam with them off and didn't see any evidence of
spalling, pitting, or rusting.

Since then, I've installed a full digital IFR stack, earned an instrument
rating with it, put in an interior, and flew it to Alaska and back (among other things
with the 500 hours we've put on it).

In short, take the advice of expecting large-ish repairs in the short-term.
In our case, I (probably mistakenly) thought that we were buying a "fixer-upper," but
at least it was mechanically sound and flyable immediately. I developed a good
repoire with my mechanic, and did all the avionics installations myself from used
equipment... so from nothing to King digital IFR stack was less than $5k. That's not
normal. To have done it the "normal" way, the same stack would probably have cost
$15k to buy and have installed.

Interior was the same... cost $1200 and a few weeks' worth of my time doing
prep work and doing the install after the upholstery shop made up the panels and
recovered the seats.

Other maintenance has been fairly "normal." In short, I guess I'm saying you
may get off OK, but you may need to do some big work. If you're mechanically inclined
and have a mechanic you can work with, you could get by inexpensively. If you have to
have all the work done, it'll likely cost you more than it's worth. If the top end
needs work like ours does, it isn't too bad. If the cam is rusted and spalled, you
gotta split the cases which is a good fraction of the labor for a full overhaul.

-Cory


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* Cory Papenfuss, Ph.D., PPSEL-IA *
* Electrical Engineering *
* Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University *
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