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.
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