Since starting to build my Legacy more than five years ago, I have been reading all kinds of stuff about lean of peak.  The sum and substance of it seems to be that both traditional wisdom and non-uniform cylinder peak mixtures dictated rich of peak operation.  Then came Gamijectors and a huge split of opinion as to whether lean of peak operation (now feasible) was advisable.  The debate continues with tradition (it seems) on one side and the numbers on the other.

All this was interesting to me in an academic sort of way until I started thinking back on my early training (back in the late 60s.)  At that time, there was (I think) a single engine temp guage (pretty sure it was egt from one randomly selected cylinder) on the Cherokee 140s on which I trained, but there may have been no engine temperature guage. Without regard to any guage that might have been installed, I was taught to lean for cruise by slowly leaning the mixture until the engine ran rough and then enrichening it enough so that it smoothed out again.

Thinking back on this, it seems that there are two possibilities for what this produced.  The first is that the cylinders were peaking at widely different mixtures.  As a result, the procedure I was taught would produce one cylinder running lean of peak and all of the others running richer in relation to its peak than the leanest one (God knows how much.)  The second is that the cylinders had a relatively uniform peak mixture and I was running all four cylinders lean of peak.  Presumably, it varied from aircraft to aircraft.

I believe my training in this regard was the standard training given to new pilots.  If so, most of us over a certain age routinely operated lean of peak on one or more cylinders whenever we followed the training we were given.

Am I missing something?