With some Summer trips planned soon (although sadly not the West Coast Tour, postponed for the year due to work pressures), I decided to put N131JF in the shop (more correctly, at J&S Aviation in Sherman) for some work. Specifically:

1. Resolution to a worsening oil leak in the engine compartment, that was beginning to coat the engine after every flight. The turning point came when I found that the top of the engine cylinder fins was becoming coated with a film of oil, the leak having worsened to the point that the oil was making its way up through the cooling fins to the topside of the engine.
2. Replacement of hoses from the oil cooler to the oil filter. Those hoses were 14 years old, past the replacement date for rubber hoses.
3. Resolution of a transmit issue with the radio, whereby the transmission range from the radio had dropped to 100 yards on the ground, and tranmissions in the pattern were illegible to just about anybody in the air or on the ground.

I therefore flew the plane to Sherman, and, after showing John Hooker how to start the engine so that he could ground-run it to find the source of leaks, I left it there for the week.

The oil leak turned out to be mostly due to a failed gasket around the blanking plate installed over the right magneto hole in the accessory case, this magneto having been removed when the engine was modified to use a Jeff Rose ignition system.
The hoses were replaced with nice new rubber hoses and fittings.
The radio transmit issue turned out to be due to the connection inside the radio tray to the coax socket coming adrift, due to a circlip having lost all of its spring capability. We tried to re-use the circlip but it kept opening. So into the trash bin it went and a new circlip that had some spring capability was used instead. Problem solved.