Sun Aug 5 2007

Fuel tank miscellaneous

Here's a shot looking down the barrel of a BNC connector. You can see light through the center conductor. I was a little concerned this might be a potential leak path even after the fitting is all gooped up. What I was thinking is that fuel might be able to enter the wire at the lug end, travel through the space between the strands of wire, and come out this hole. It'll probably just get filled up with solder, so I shouldn't worry about it.

But I think after crimping these lugs on, I'll solder the wire to the lug. That should seal the end of the connector at the lug end. Then smearing some proseal around the end where the wire goes in will completely seal the wire from being a conduit for fuel to travel down. Note that I decided to cut off the plastic sheath. It's not doing any good in this application and it'll just prevent me from getting the proseal where it needs to be.

I wanted to mount my capacitive fuel sender compensation probes (a custom mod), but I only had the 7/8 inch long screws that came with the capacitive fuel sender kit. Those were too long, so I tried a 1/2 inch long screw (one of the tank attach screws) which was too short as you can see here.

I didn't want to get stuck, so I ran over to Sears hardware to get some flush head machine screws. I didn't care if they weren't actual AN hardware since all they're doing is holding on some fuel sender probes. I needed four screws and I got the last four they had. Here you can see the 1/2 inch long screw on the left, along with the four 5/8 inch long screws on the right.

But it was too good to be true. I forgot that the head angle on AN screws is different than on machine screws. The ones from Sears don't fit into the timmerman washer correctly.

This shot clearly shows the difference in the head angle. Machine screw from Sears on left; AN screw on right.

After ordering some of the correct screws from Spruce, I got back to work on the tanks. My nicely formed clips don't have the loop in the right place. I ended up drilling out this clip and fabricating a different clip arrangement altogether.

Here's the new clip before bending.

...and after.

Here's the mounting arrangement. Temporarily held on with a cleco.

I riveted this puppy in, sealed it over, and called it a night.