More Fuel Tank Work

Another productive day today! As always the day started out at the cafe to have some breakfast and load up on coffee. We met our friends there and after breakfast decided to head over to their hangars. After a few minutes of talking with our friend Dick he offered to take me up in his RV-6. I couldn't say yes fast enough! What luck, he let me taxi, takeoff, maneuver, and land! After we took off we head out to do a few maneuvers and turned back to practice some touch and goes. After him doing the first one he let me in on the techniques he uses for slowing down and what airspeed to aim for on final. The first few weren't exactly perfect but they were suvivable. My fifth and final landing was almost a greaser! All three wheels down at the same time; if that's not motivation to continue the build I don't know what is! What a great ride, and it was only my second RV flight to date. Got to log that one.

After the ride it was time to get back to the real world. Dad and I headed over to the hangar and got to work! The fuel tank skin was still clecoed to the spar from yesterday so we continued from there. If the skin doesn't match up perfectly with the spar/baffle/leading edge, then you're supposed to elongate the holes that you previously drilled through on the baffle. Ours however came out perfect! Just a couple of holes had to be re-drilled to make the baffle fit a bit easier to the brackets. The plans call for the ribs to be clecoed to the Z-brackets and the baffle, then match drilled. After using the long #30 drill bit to get these done we headed out to lunch.

We took off the ribs and clecoed them to the skin. Man the tank looks (and feels) awesome with the ribs in it. Once they were in the assembly goes back onto the spar to be drilled to the W-423 joint plate. We did this and decided to drill all of the holes in the skin (this was where we made a mistake). The plans say to only drill the joint plate while the tank is on, this way you don't accidently drill into the spar. Well dummy me missed that part of the plans. After we pulled the tank off we noticed we nicked the spar a bit with the drill. About five nicks got put into it that will need to be sanded/buffed out. They're not critical, but we don't want anything that can develop into a crack on our spar! I sanded them down a bit and they're already pretty rounded off, but I still need to get them perfected out.

With the tank off we finish-drilled the tank attach holes with a #19 drill for the attach screws. This thing is looking awesome! While I'm at work tomorrow Dad's gonna head over to the hangar and start devinyling some skins and dimpling a few parts. After work I plan on countersinking the tank skin for the rivets that attach the skin to the baffle. We're making progress slowly but surely!