Well, it’s Friday, and I had both a great and crappy week.
Enough small talk, let’s get building!
Since it was 1,000°F in the garage today, I brought the right tank skin inside (nice air conditioning) to do some deburring.
First, I deburred the outside of the skin, then moved to the interior. Per my usual, after deburring a few holes, I’d scuff up the line so I knew where I had been.
A few lines deburred and scuffed.
In preparation for dimpling (where the skin needs to slide on the workbench, I cleaned up a little, which included taking apart the vacuum to find out why it’s been making that weird noise.
Clean workbench!
Here's the scuffed skin, ready for dimpling.
I still needed to remove some vinyl from a few places, so I clecoed the drain flange on the wrong side and used it as a guide for the soldering iron.
This is on the inside of the skin, where this normally goes on the outside.
After soldering.
I did the same with the fill cap and flange. Clecoed them on the outside so I could get a nice round hole.
You can see where I've marked the flange for future positioning.
After devinyling with the soldering iron...
I don’t know what this picture is showing.
Another picture of the skin?
Oh, while the soldering iron was cooling down, I didn’t want to just abandon it to start a fire or anything, so I kept the fill cap flange out and decided to do some countersinking.
First, though, I found some 0.32″ and made a #40 hole, then dimpled with the deeper tank dimple dies.
A tank dimple to test countersinks.
After some countersinking…
After testing, I don't think these were deep enough.
I turned it a few clicks deeper and went back around.
Much better.
With the test dimple in place...now I'm happy.
Hmm. Soldering iron is still hot. Maybe I’ll fool around with some AN hardware since that stuff is coming up.
I fished out the AN hardware, both -4D and -6D sizes and screwed some pieces together based on the plans. -4 is four sixteenths, or for 1/4″ tubing and -6 is six sixteenths, or 3/8″ tubing.
On the RV airplanes, fuel vent lines are 1/4″ tubing (-4D hardware, in the background), and fuel feed lines are 3/8″ tubing (-6D hardware, in the foreground).
-4D and -6 D hardware.
1.5 hours. Proseal soon…
Andrew's RV-7 Build Log 