Stjohn's RV-7

5 hours.
Prosealed the access plates and fuel senders to the tanks today. And yes, I’m counting setup, pondering, and cleanup time. The last time I messed with the toxic nougat, it was the rudder, and the actual sealing properties weren’t as important as just gluing the bits together so they didn’t shift under stress from riveting. This is the real deal. I made damn sure every surface to get gooed was cleaned thoroughly with MEK, and that the tankside surface of the access plate was scuffed up beforehand. Access plate. That’s a good one. If you slather a ring of this crap around the outside of it and screw it down, you ain’t accessing anything in the tank for a long long time. Following the advice on VAF, which made sense to me, I discarded both the cork rings for the access plate and the rubber gaskets that came with the fuel senders. Supposedly Prosealing it will give you a much better seal and the cork gaskets tend to deteriorate over time and eventually leak fuel. This I believe; when I was a kid, we had gaskets on our boat tanks made of the same stuff and they leaked like a bastard. I just hope they seal, because if they don’t, it’s going to be a very, very bad day, which could set me back several hours if I have to somehow get those plates off and fix/modify anything inside there.
The blogware’s probably going to cut off the right hand side, but here they are, sealed and curing.

As you can see, I haven’t dialed in that ‘beautiful proseal job’ look yet. I’m just hoping it works. I made sure there was enough goo, liberally applied on the surfaces in question. I even put some around where the weld for the sender insulator is. You never know. But I bet I wind up sealing that over once I’ve got a wire on it. that’s no big deal, I know how I’m going to do that: Hook the shop-vac up to an adapter going into the fuel fill hole to provide negative pressure and daub a wad of the gray all around that fitting. Hopefully Stewart-Warner has thought of and made the unit airtight already.

This is more of a checklist for me than a report of actual work done, but here’s what i need to do to finish the wings:
Seal/test fuel tanks
Install nav antenna in wingtip (on the way from AC Spruce)
Install nav/landing lights in wingtips (on the way from CreativAir)
Run power and antenna wires from wingtips through conduits to wing roots
Run pitot/AOA plumbing to wing root from pitot mast location (order this from SafeAir)
Make wingtip connectors for lights/antenna.
Figure out whether or not to close up the wings, and if so, install pitot/AOA mast and probe.
Once these things are done, I believe the wings are finished. Then I have to store them in the garage and build a wooden cage around them so they don’t get bashed by various comings and goings for laundry and yardwork. This can be done by a few 2×4’s framed outward from the wall and covered with a thin sheet of plywood.