It was a long day, but I'm finally home. I flew commercial into Augusta, GA on Sunday and spent the night at the Marriott downtown. I selected this location hoping to enjoy my time in the city, but was delayed in arriving due to, you guessed it, maintenance issues with the Envoy Air flight. By the time I got in everything was closed, so hotel food it was for dinner, breakfast and lunch (to go).
This morning got started at 6am. James from Watson Aero picked me up downtown and we made it over to Louisville airport by around 9am. We plugged in my new Tanis heater and waited for it to do its thing. I reviewed the thorough logs that James kept of all the work and when I was satisfied with what I saw, sent him the final payment.
The engine started up easier than ever and I taxied over for fuel. The heater didn't have quite enough time to do its thing, so after fueling I had to wait a bit for the oil temperature to reach 100 degrees. Then I took off and circled over the airport for a bit. Everything was running nice and smooth. Temps were running high, but that's to be expected with new cylinders. I had to run at about 12.5 GPH to keep CHTs under 400 degrees.
Once satisfied with performance over the airport, I set off on my first leg of a two leg journey back to my home base in Linden, NJ. All was well, for about 45 minutes. Then I got an alert on my PFD: magnetometer fail. I was flying IFR though it was VMC. I asked ATC for permission to cycle my avionics (I wasn't sure what needed to be cycled, so I wanted to flip the master, requiring permission for lost comms.) The magnetometer stayed down. I wasn't going to make the flight all the way back to Linden without a heading indicator, so I canceled IFR and asked to divert to KRUQ -- home of SouthTec. I figured if anyone could help me, Glenn and his team could. The diversion was only another hour or so of flight and required shifting course Northward.

I arrived to KRUQ around lunch time. The team had just taken off but they were hopeful they could come up with a solution for me after lunch. Sure enough, when they got back, Dick Filbey came up with a plan. (Funny enough, Dick was the guy who ferried N269RB back with me from Florida when I purchased it back in 2014.) They were able to find a compatible GMU 44 from one of the WAAS DA-42s they are overhauling to loan me while we wait for a replacement from Garmin. Note: this seems a bit silly -- shouldn't all the G1000 components swappable? Well, no. If you upgrade a GMU, it cannot be downgraded. So we couldn't use a GMU from a non-WAAS plane as it would then be incompatible with the donor plane.
Fortunately the loaner GMU 44 worked great. I was back up in the air around 2:30 and got back to Linden around 9pm. The engine ran incredibly well during my return flight, and it even seems that I got a bit of a speed boost. My TAS was pretty consistently around 150 knots. Usually I see closer to 140 or slightly less. I do have a bit of tweaking to do -- as seen in another thread on the board, the governor seems to need to be adjusted as I'm not hitting 2700 RPM. I also think I need another dynamic prop balance, since the prop was repaired but only statically balanced (so the previous dynamic balance may be throwing things off.)
For those following along with this thread over the last year, you may recall that I had hoped to get many more hours out of the engine. However, an annual inspection last year uncovered some metal filings in the oil filter. Here you'll see the camshaft, which is completely shot. Two lobes are quite visibly damaged, with chunks of metal missing. The edges of the lobes are also chipped. This happened despite using Camguard and appropriate multi-weight oil for the climate. However, being parked on the ramp, we did not have an engine heater. I had one installed with the overhaul, and we have come up with a solar powered contraption to provide power to heat up the engine in the winter. Hopefully we get many more years out of this overhauled engine.
p.s. this was also the first time I got to test out the LEMO adapter featured on this forum and it worked great! Love not having to carry extra batteries, and that the headset starts right up with the master switch!