I wholeheartedly agree with Jeff Edwards' comment, up to a point, when he
wrote:

"And that's where the smartness ended-- from redundancy to none at all.
Should have got it fixed before you departed. What if the spring failed on
the way home"?

However, I decided to take a calculated risk for the following reasons.
First, I knew the spring I had installed, when the mixture lever was all the
way to the rich position, was almost fully collapsed and therefore under
very low stress (the lever takes very little torque to move it, ergo, the
spring was nearly relaxed) and I replace it at each annual. Second, because
I thought about the possibility of just such a secondary failure, I followed
the road that went directly from airport to airport. Third, my airplane was
back to the condition in which I had done most of my pre-Lancair flying (in
C's and P's) - I had to rely on a single item to keep my engine running.
Lastly, and probably the least valid of all reasons, it was only 20 minutes
to home base.

I thought it was worth the risk.

Dan Schaefer