Midnight Grey Death (sealing the tanks)

Normally when people refer to the fuel tank sealant there are a number of words to describe it -- Proseal (a brand name), Black Death (it is sort of black) or other names that have four letter words in the title.  When we were working Darren interjected a little levity and said that it really wasn't black it was more like a Midnight Grey.  Henceforth we'll refer to it as "Midnight Grey Death".  This has to be the worst thing we've had to work on so far.  The prep work is very demanding as the instructions require you to score the mating surfaces really well and then clean it so that there are no contaminants.  However, you can't touch the aluminum without gloves because your skin oils will weaken the sealant.  So, we got to spend the day wearing blue gloves.  But, it gets worse, the tank sealant -- midnight grey death -- is sticky and it gets everywhere.  Oh yeah, it really likes to stick to the blue gloves.  Supposedly sealing is like icing a cake but imagine if cake icing would stick to everything and couldn't really be cleaned off except with some awful chemical and major scrubbing.

Anyways, I've complained enough.  For all of that we actually made good progress on both fuel tanks.  We installed and riveted the fuel tank stiffners in both tanks.  On the left tank we also installed the fuel tank filler flange, the tank drain flange and sealed the rivet heads.  We're well positioned to get the tanks together this week.  This is one of those jobs that was rotten to do but the memory will fade...eventually.

Oh yeah, we also did some work on Thursday night last week.  We riveted the inboard and outboard flap brackets, installed the centre bracket, and matchdrilled all of the reinforcing angles.  Also we assembled the aileron attach brackets.

Bucking Rivets

Yes, that was always meant to be a "B".  Sorry for the lack of updates over the last few weeks but the work hasn't been exciting enough to write about in detail.  However, the work may not have been unique or exciting but the results are great!  We're finished riveting the leading edge on the main spar (done last weekend) and riveted on all of the top skins and "J" channels.  I'm not interested in counting the number of rivets we've installed over the last couple of weeks but suffice it to say that it was alot.  Once we finished riveting the wing skins,  we got to work on the aileron and flap attach brackets (we'll post pictures of this but if you can't wait you can take a look at the left wing pictures). The aileron brackets are fairly straight-forward (that is until you need to figure out what needs a countersink and what doesn't) but the flap brackets have some reinforcing angles that need to be cut.  All of these parts are cut and ready to be match drilled, prepped and primed during the next work session.