Am I the only one that has a noisy M5 (Or any Maule)? While I'm flying along my Maule pops and creeks every so often, some of it sounds like wing sheeting flexing. I look around to see if something is flying off the plane...

You can hear anything other than the deafening wind noise? I would personally be very concerned if my airplane made any noise loud enough to hear while in flight.

Now taxing around and really slow flight to touch down I do hear some noise from the wings.

The M4 and M5 wings were built on a flat table.
When washout is fed in by adjusting the rear struts, the wing is twisted and wing skins have to buckle (oilcan).
This puts great strain on the rivets and the tank cover screws.
The wing skin fastener holes get wallowed out and or develop radial cracks.
One can see grey dust/stain at certain rivets and eventually the holes enlarge and skin is loose and needs to be fixed.
Later wings were built with a washout bias thus no oil canning. Even later wings were built with a thicker top skin.

It's a 78' M5-235C, not the latest of the M5's. I don't see any loose rivets or elongated holes. I replaced all the tank cover screws and didn't see any elongated holes. I can manhandle the tail, wings, struts, etc and can't find anything loose or any noise. But when I push on the lower wing skins I get an oil canning pop noise. Guess I'll look around more.

Jeremy,

Are you saying that the M-6s were NOT built on a flat table, i.e. they had the washout already built in? Adjusting mine to get the proper washout resulted in slightly buckled skins, so I assumed those had been built on a flat table...

If you are able to hear ANYTHING beyond wind and engine noise, it might be a matter of concern... LOL! These are tough birds, they take a beating and keep flying.

Andy, I think the M6 was built flat in its early iteration up to 1986.