[hharney]

First as Ernie indicated the costs of the certification (STC) would be a huge burden to bear let alone having an unknown final cost. Then in order to justify the costs you need an audience to believe in your application. So the believer is not just paying for a new engine but has to pay for the certification burden. To get what? The same performance or reliability. Personally I think the two engines are to similar to really entice someone to pay extra to make the switch. When Jack Riley made the Rockets you were buying a whole new airplane with new avionics, interior, paint, and on and on. These modified Skymasters had a market. I don't know if you have noticed but Skymasters are a dime a dozen compared to 10 years ago. There is hardly a market out there for these slower, gas guzzling light twin engine airplanes. So those of us that have them are just trying keep them in the air and be able to afford some fuel to burn through them once in a while. My use has dropped 50% in the last 6 years just because of fuel costs. I am know operating LOP to justify using the airplane for some trips. There's a lot of Skymasters out there but most of them are idle and folks are not going to spend a lot of money on them.

My Continentals have been fantastic. I would not want to trade them for a shakey Lycoming. The Continentals have always run smoother than the Lycomings. I get way over the published TBO so that indicates that Cessna failed at increasing the TBO as the engines got better. Cessna did not see a market for the Skymaster so why pay more to certify the engines for hight TBO. But the engines will go beyond TBO easily.

If one is going to spend money for better engines then maybe that would be diesel. The future of AvGas is unstable. Shame on Continental and Lycoming for not evolving with the situation we are in now with leaded fuel. They could see it but sat on their hands, my opinion. The Skymaster is a great airplane and those that have them either really love them for what they are or they are burdened with the cost of ownership because they could buy them so cheap. These light twins are very reasonable to buy but are not cheap to maintain and use. If you can't afford to maintain them and use them you are going to have a real burden, an albatross. When this happens the Skymaster ends up deteriorating and it's all over. There are to many of those Skymasters out there. I have searched the FAA registrations quite extensively and there are a lot of Skymasters that have expired registration. It's usually only a matter of time for those airframes to be no longer airworthy or not feasible to get back into the air.

I agree with Ernie, find a clean airframe and pay the extra to find one with every option you want. With the low cost of Skymasters today it's a bargain to buy best one out there. The cheap ones will just cost you more to make equal to the best one out there.