Fuel Tanks - Proseal bottle #1

Happy Easter! Before some evening family plans, we decided to start the proseal adventure! Since we're familiar with it and it seems to work quite well, we're sticking with using the same stuff we used on the empennage, "Chem-Seal" #CS3204 from Aircraft Spruce. It comes in a 3.5oz bottle, and I've got 4 on hand... we'll see how far this amount goes (I'm assuming we'll need more at some point).

We started off with the station looking like this:

Beginning the proseal adventure!

Unfortunately, we don't have any pics of the process itself because, well, we were wearing gloves covered in the most terrible chemical substance known to man. It's not terrible because it's particularly harmful, it's terrible because it's like they designed this stuff to stick to *everything* but yet come off of *nothing*. And it's so goopy. I swear, due to entropy someday the whole earth will be covered in proseal. Sarah still loves it though-- it reminds her of cake icing. She even ran to the kitchen to use an icing scribe to manage this stuff... actually it was a great idea and helped a lot. I'll just need to remind her we need to get a new scribe now and not re-use this one on food. :-)

Anyway, we're now one bottle of proseal down, which got us through all of the R tank stiffeners and about 2/3 of the L tank stiffeners, as well as both fuel cap flanges and the R tank sump flange. We're "wet riveting" which means we're setting the rivets right away instead of waiting for the sealant to partially cure. It's messier this way, but I think it will be easier to have a clean-looking finished product. We were able to exhaust the whole 3.5oz bottle before it hardened, so that was good news too! Here's our completed work:

R tank stiffeners prosealed and riveted

R fuel cap flange

This next week may be tough to find a block of time to do another batch, but we'll see how things go. It's coming together though!