Talk about slow progress, building these tanks takes a lot of time. Today, was just assembly of part of the tank. In the same amount of time I could have assembled the entire tank if it didn’t need to be sealed.
Today I was able to seal up the machining holes in a few of the exterior ribs. These holes were used when the parts were formed in a big press. So they had to be closed up to keep fuel from leaking out. I had a heck of a time getting the nutplates attached and sealed. These nutplates will eventually allow the fuel level “sender” to attach to the tank when it’s time. But luckily after a few attempts I got it.
I then went on to get the small leading edge rib in place. This short rib will be the closest inboard and will have some other components connected to it later. I was also able to get two of the inner ribs attached as well. The process is basically, use masking tape to mask off the area where sealant should be. Mix up the sealant (2-part epoxy), cleco the rib in the skin, fill the dimples on the outside of the skin with more sealant, insert rivets and then rivet. Remove the cleco’s, add more sealant to THOSE holes, more rivets and rivet those.
THEN, you can start to finalize things. Clean up the tools that are now icky from all the sealant over them. Then create a seam on each side of the rib to seal it. Add sealant to the bottom of the rivet that was driven to seal it, spray fingers with Acetone (keeps sealant from sticking to you) and smooth out sealant inside tank. Remove masking tape. Clean misc areas inside the skin that were messed up during the riveting.
THEN, clean the outside of the skin with MEK, flip the skin over, clean the other side of the tank with MEK as well.
REPEAT
As a result of all the steps, clean up, limited usefullness time period of the epoxy, its a long process. I think each rib is taking me about 2 hours from start to finish. So you are looking at about 6 hours of work in today’s pictures.
There are 4 more regular size ribs, the tank attachment arm, the back-half of the inboard rib where the short one is, the long/large baffle at the back of the tank, and the attachment Z’s. There has to be at least a full day or more of time left on this tank alone.
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