Okay, so a little of my work this evening was actually done AT WORK today. (Don’t tell my boss.)
Since I don’t have a Parker Rolo-Flair (shouldn’t it be “flare”?), but we have a few at work, I asked one of my RV buddies from work to show me how he does it. So, I brought my prebent -4 tube into him, and he, well, showed me how to do it.
(I was going to buy a rolo-flair tool, but at $80, I don’t want to buy one until I really need one. I need this flare (see?) now, the one for the left tank in a month or so (more like 3 or 4), and then I won’t need one until working on the fuse and running fuel, brake, and vent lines. I don’t want an $80 tool gathering dust until then.)
Anyway, he showed me how to do it, with a little cutting oil on the flaring (see!?) cone.
Back home, this is what I ended up with.
(He also showed me how to roll the straight portion of the vent line, which I was having a heck of a time getting perfectly straight, on a countertop or flat piece of door. You roll it like a roller between your fingers and the countertop. I was inside doing it on the granite countertop while the girlfriend was making dinner. She said “Get your fuel line off my counter!”)
No, she didn’t. But it would have been funny if she did, right?
FLARE!
Next, I fed the vent line through all the snap bushings and slid the inboard rib with the -4 bulkhead fitting in place.
Looks good here.
How perfect were my measurements! Now I just have to bent the end up a little to get to the highest portion of the tank.
I copied Mike Bullock here, and used a wrench and another lever to bend it slowly upward.
Nice trick, Mike.
After repositioning the inboard rib, this sucker is at the very highest point.
Oh, I also did a little safety wiring. Then, thinking that I could unscrew the nut, and re-clock it to have a shorter, more sturdy safety wire run, I figured out that the nut only has one “entrance” for the threads, so the clocking is as shown only.
First try, which was perfectly acceptable.
Second try, after reciting the famous quote ‘perfect is the enemy of good enough.’
Alright, Andrew, stop messing with it.
0.5 hours. Time to start thinking about closing this bad boy up.
Andrew's RV-7 Build Log 