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Wow, not much work lately on the project. Too much life got in the way (on top of my procrastinating on finishing the tanks...) to get much done, hence the sluggish progress for the last 2-3 weeks. This entry is really from yesterday and today but I'm just putting it in on one day's log. I started the session with Erin here so we went and did some building in the garage. Since the next step was attaching the Z brackets to the tank baffle, I needed to take them off the spars. I took them off while Erin marked which way they needed to go. Then she deburred the holes on the Z brackets. Once this was done, I ground down the nozzle of my rivet puller. Then I mixed up a bit of proseal and thinly covered the mating surface of the Z bracket, twirled the rivets in sealant, and set them with the modified puller. It didn't actually go that easily as my puller is a cheap piece of crap and wasn't gripping the rivet stems. Eventually, I got them all set. Then I shot and bucked the rivets on the inboard and outboard Z brackets. Here are all the brackets riveted to the baffle.  Here's a close up of the inboard Z bracket.  And one of the middle ones with the pulled rivets.  Finally, I closed up the right tank. In the directions it says some builders add proseal to the cork gasket. I did that too as I have heard of some people having trouble with just the cork gasket. I didn't wholly think through how I should have done this. What I did is put proseal around the hole in the rib, stick the gasket to it, put proseal on the cover, then stick that to the gasket, then put the screws in. As sticky as the proseal is, the gasket still slid down when it was stuck to the rib. This happened again with the cover so the holes got all misaligned and I had a tough time getting the holes all lined up again. On the other tank I will stick the screws through the holes in the cover, then stick the gasket to the cover, then stick the gasket and cover to the rib and screw it in so the holes all stay lined up.  Now that the tank is assembled, I need to test it for leaks before I call it done but I am pretty pumped to get to this point. As an initial test, I covered the fuel vent in the rib and blew into the fuel pickup. It seemed like it held air as my lungs did not detect any leaks and it blew the pressurized air back out once I uncovered the holes. All this really tells me is that there are no giant holes but I still need to do a pressure test to really see if they have leaks or not.
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