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Perfectly balanced, as all things should be

At least some of you are probably aware of an activity called wakeboarding. It's like water skiing, except you are on a single, wide board and the idea is to use the wake of the boat to launch you into the air and do various tricks. It's a lot like snowboarding on the water.

Something I discovered today is that there's a technique for adjusting the wake that the boat makes by changing the weight distribution of the boat. This is done by adding weight in the form of ballast to the boat in a particular location so it moves the overall center of gravity forward or backward. There are products available to make this easy. Some are containers for water. Some of those are even shaped to fit more easily into the various locations of the boat, such as the bow. Others are containers for solid material, such as bags of steel shot.

I bring this up because the Beechcraft Musketeer has one very critical difference from a Cessna 172. It has a markedly more narrow C.G. envelope. For example, if I were to take my wife flying with me, and she was in the right front seat, and the fuel tanks were full, the plane would be nose-heavy and outside the envelope. If she were in one of the rear seats, it would be fine. One way of addressing this is to put some weight in the baggage compartment to bring the C.G. rearward. It adds weight but, as long as it's below the maximum, and there aren't any issues with density altitude, runway length, etc., it's still fine.

When I was looking at the plane before purchasing it, the previous owner took me up for a flight to demonstrate how it takes off, handles, and lands. Because of the C.G. envelope, he put about 50 lbs of stuff in the baggage compartment to ensure the plane would be balanced. Although it's not what he used, he mentioned that a lot of Musketeer pilots will use bottles of water or sand bags for this purpose.

I got to thinking about what would work well and a bag of shot came to mind. So I started looking around for something that would work and came upon the bags of shot used to balance boats for wakeboarding. They are available in 25 and 50 lb. sizes so I ordered two 25 lb. bags. I figure I'll just keep them in the plane and take them out if I don't need them for a particular flight. They're compact, and they have handles for easy handling. They also have metal rings so I can fasten them down to make sure they don't leave the baggage compartment.

I've heard that there are also weights available that can be installed in the tail section. I may look into that as a potential longer-term solution since it will require a lot less weight, but these shot bags should work for now.

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