Sat Aug 11 2007

Fuel tank miscellaneous

I cut and flared the vent line for the right tank, but forgot that the vent line has to make a joggle over to pick up the position of the bulkhead fitting. The joggle took up some of the length I needed, making the line shorter than I had calculated. Fortunately, it will still engage the clip by about 1/4 inch, so it should hold just fine.

I almost forget to put the ferule and nut on before installing the inboard most rib.

I like the way the wire routing worked out to the inboard fuel sender plate. It has two lugs attached. The wire running to the BNC connector kind of cinches up the wire running between the two sender plates taking out any remaining slack. The third wire in the top right of the picture is for my custom compensator probe.

Another little detail I've been putting off for a while...fabricate and install the anti-hangup bracket for the second rib. The plans which indicate some type of diagonal strip, but after monkeying around with about a dozen different configurations of that (none of which seemed like they would work well, I determined that a different concept was in order to prevent the flop tube o-ring from getting damaged on the edge of the rib hole.

Here's the flat pattern of the new bracket. The 5/16 dimension is wrong...should be 7/16.

This is gonna do a nice job of protecting the o-ring and keeping the tube from hanging up.

Here it is riveted in place. I used the dimple dies in the rivet gun to dimple the rib. Unfortunately I dinged up the female die. Gotta order a new set from Cleaveland Tool. :-( It's amazing how a one second mistake can cost $36.

Later, I riveted in the inboard most rib into the right tank. All ribs are in place on this tank!