If you look closely you can see the masked off area where the fuel neck will be mounted to the skin and which will get sealed off with Pro-Seal again. This time though they want you to put a release agent on the skin so you can remove the neck later (at least once a year for you annual). To avoid issues with the paint and the different chemicals I will be using I decided to mask off that mating area and allow the Pro-Seal to have contact with the bare aluminum instead of paint.
Once the priming was done and the parts were happily drying away, I went back to the shop (did I mention how much I love my A/C in the shop?) and prepared the first step of the goop-assisted assembly of the tank. Before that though I wanted to make sure that the perceived mismatch of the nutplated ring and the screw holes in the forward tank skin weren't presenting an unsurmountable issue when I finally will put the cover on. So I screwed the cover on first to see if a match and possible seal could get accomplished. Thumbs up on this one! One screw was a little hard to get in but with the help of Boelube that worked out anyway.
And then it was time to mix the goop and get ready for the action! Boy, what a mess!!! I mixed 30 grams of base compound plus 3 grams of activator and filled most of it in a syringe for controlled application. I put a spotted layer on the inside of the tank skin where it would mate the flanges of the front skin and the took care of the front skin flanges. I carefully put the front skin in, so that the short flange would mate with the main tank skin and aligning the side flange with the skin. That was easy to hold with one hand while the other was grasping for a cleco and them pliers. The first one is always the hardest in such a case but this one worked out ok. I started clecoing the side flange, then the bottom flange and the other side flange. I also gooped up the fitting for the tank drain and clecoed that in place as it shares holes with the other two parts.
Finding the right rivets would have been better done before I started this mess to save time. The standard B2 tank sealant just has a two hour window to work with. The riveting worked pretty well, usually just one slow pull with the large hand riveter and the stem broke clean off. Besides the sticky mess, really no problem. It was slow as I followed Van's advise to goop up the stem of every rivet before setting them.
Then I tried to use up the rest of the Pro-Seal at around an hour later. The stuff already got a bit thicker and harder to squeeze out the syringe. This time the front mount bracket should come on. I put sealant between the skin and the bracket just in case one rivet would leak a bit, clecoed and set rivets.
The countersunk rivets (I forgot their name right now) gave me trouble. Two of the stems broke off in the riveter. A look inside showed that they hadn't compressed that much, so I wonder if I should just goop them up from the inside now or go through the pain of drilling them out and trying again... Not sure what would increase the likelihood for a leak. No matter what I will do I'll first have to grind that stem down anyway, so maybe I worry about that later and take a closer look at the inside of the rivets again.
Whew, squeezing all these rivets manually as Van's was asking is quite a bit when you haven't done it in a while. It really took me almost the full two hours to complete the job. I had 15 minutes left that I used for the cleanup of this mess.
Sorry for the long text without any stage photos but there was no time to do that as well as my gloves always having some stocky Pro-Seal on them that I wouldn't want on the camera.
You can see the stems better in the following picture.
That concluded the afternoon session. For one the Pro-Seal had to cure before I could consider to continue and then I also wanted to get to my sister-in-law's birthday party. Happy Birthday, Flor!
And finally I didn't forget to look up a detail in the instructions that show how the front cover will eventually get put into place and hopefully seal the whole thing up. See, Dave, no cork ring!
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