Fuel Tanks - Proseal bottle #7

Finished the tanks tonight! Well... for now anyway. We'll still need to test them and repair any leaks, as well as finish priming and installing the bearings and a few nutplates that we've deferred for now. For all intents and purposes, the tanks are "done".... wooooo!!! That was one of the longer and more painful endeavors so far.

Today after work we mixed up our seventh and final bottle of proseal and installed the baffle for the R tank, in a duplicated effort from yesterday when we did the same thing to the L tank. I have to say it went quite well and didn't take too much time, maybe an hour and a half or so for the entire job, which included about 200 flush rivets on the top and bottom aft flanges and 40 pop rivets to hold the attach zees and baffle to the tank flanges.

With that, it was time to set the tanks aside to let them cure for I'm thinking at least two weeks. That should give us about the perfect amount of time to build the ailerons and flaps, and get them attached to the wings before the fuselage kit arrives. Speaking of which, this is "the week" Van's says the kit will ship, so I can tentatively plan to see the crate here by maybe next week sometime? We're very excited to see it arrive!

Since we got done with the R tank so quickly, we had just a bit of time left to clean up and pull the parts for the ailerons. After some cellophane-peeling and parts-labelling, we had a surprisingly small stack of parts that need to be cut, filed, drilled, deburred, dimpled and riveted together! I snuck in a few minutes in with the bandsaw to separate the A-1005, A-1006, A-1007, and A-1008 bits (pictured below) but other than that didn't do any real "work" on anything. Still plenty more cutting, sanding and filing left to do!

The A-1005 thru A-1008 bits that make up the guts of the ailerons

Aileron skins, spars, stiffeners, and counterbalance

We're hoping that after coming off a big project like the fuel tanks, we should be able to make quick work of these, followed by the flaps which appear to be a fairly similar process, only slightly bigger of course. One thing we'll need to keep in mind is that it is critical to keep these parts straight and square when final-drilling and assembling them... apparently a number of builders have accidentally put a "twist" into them which carries through to the final product. I have read that unless the twist is extreme, it doesn't affect flight characteristics much (it can usually be trimmed out) but it is a definite cosmetic issue. Also, of course I'd rather not build a twisted *anything*. We'll see how well we can do it!