Monday October 13, 2008
Fuse Ordered, Finished Fuel Tank, Wing Prep, Pushrods
(4.0 Hours Fuel Tanks, Fuselage, 3.0 Hours Wings)
7.0 Hours Total

I faxed my fuselage order in this morning! This locks in the tailwheel and tip-up options. I'm happy with those choices and really excited to be moving on to this next step.

Mission for today: finish the left fuel tank. Here it is with sealant applied and the baffle in place and cleco'd.

Fast-forward an hour or two and here's the thing finished, with the access plate screwed down. I'm so glad to be done with proseal. Hopefully, this tank will be leak-free like the last one, although I'm gonna wait for the sealant to be good and cured before I test.

After spending an hour cleaning up, I screwed and bolted the fuel tank down on the wing. It's definitely coming off of the wing at least once to fix some minor pillowing on the fuel tank/leading edge joint, but the fit is better than on the right wing. For now, I'm leaving it.

I worked on the scarf joint with a file for a while and then cleco'd the skins on the wing.

Here's one of the scarf joints after priming...

I'm waiting on Emily to help me with skin riveting, so I got back to work on the aileron pushrods.

Experimenting, I shoved one of the rod ends into an open pushrod end. It turns out they're a lot easier to get in than out. Oh well--no real reason that they need to come out again. I lined up the rod ends at the correct depth inside the pushrods and drilled the six holes for each one.

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