July 2, 2007: I dabbed a little bit of proseal on the vent line snap bushings and popped them in all their holes in the left tank.
July 1, 2007: Between
various non-airplane related things on this day I just piddled with the
fuel vent lines. The vent line is formed out of this 1/4 in soft
aluminum tubing supplied in the kit. After hand bending the line
straight I tried out our new tubing cutter. I also figured since
I was already doing it, I went ahead and straightened and cut the
second one as well.
Here's
our new flaring tool. After deburring the end of the tube and
making sure it was pretty smooth I clamped the tube in the proper hole
and then made my first flare… suh-weet!
July 2, 2007: Just before sliding the vent line in I realized it would be easier to
seal the rivets nearby prior to doing it. Once done, the vent
line was slid into place.
In order to get the vent line through the clip at the fuel cap flange it needs to be bent slightly.
July 21, 2007: We actually did this after step 5 (as you can probably tell from the photos). Anyway, heres
a poor-man's method of torquing tubing fittings ;-) It's just a
digital fish scale and a crescent wrench. After inserting the
fitting through the end rib with some proseal it needed to be torqued
to ~50 in-lbs. So, I measured the wrench length from the center
of the fitting to the center of the hole in the handle (in).
Dividing the torque needed by the length of the "lever arm" gives me
the force I need to see on the fish scale. One thing though, I
made sure the wrench was as close to vertical as possible so it's
weight didn't help or hinder the torquing action. Anyway...
seemed to work ok.
July 2, 2007: We haven't done step 4 yet, but with the vent line in we went ahead and installed the aft portion of the inboard rib.
Unfortunately for this rivet the bucking bar just wouldn't lay right, so I wound up
folding this guy over… so I get to drill out another rivet from
the same hole twice (see page 5 step 8)! I used the squeezer to finally set this guy.
Believe it or not, I actually prefer the rivet gun when using
proseal... the squeezer is difficult to keep from slipping around with
the proseal.
The last thing for the inboard rib was to set the 1/8in
universal head rivets attaching it to the tank attachment
bracket. The center 4 were no problem, the outter two however, I
haven't decided how to buck just yet (there's not enough room on the
underside to get a bucking bar on them). Anyway, we'll come back
to these later...
July 21, 2007: I hand bent the vent line to line up with the fitting on the inboard rib aft.
And then torqued the tube fitting in place using the fish
scale and wrench mentioned in step 4 above. Although I haven't yet I'll probably dab
some proseal on this just to ensure this thing won't back off.
