I decided to wrestle the left fuel tank together tonight.  What a pain in the ass this was.  The tank skin is fairly heavy and the ribs do not fit all that well when compared against the other parts in the kit.  The pre-punched holes combined with the relatively poor alignment of the ribs makes it difficult to cleco the tank together.  I had to tweak a number of the ribs a couple of times in order to get a half decent fit.  A little over two hours and a couple of well placed cuss words, and the left fuel tank was clecoed together.

Once clecoed together, I had to put it on the wing.  I still need to do some drilling of the z-brackets to the spar, but I couldn't resist setting it on the wing and admiring how far along I am (yeah right...  I am friggin' a long ways from done).  However, I am starting to have some big parts coming together and they actually look like parts to an airplane.  No more tripping over small parts and wing crates.  All the remaining parts sit on a couple of shelves and a table.

Just a rough placement on the wing shows me that I should be able to get a very good fit between the leading edge and the fuel tank.

Just a picture of the top side of the wing with the tank setting on the spar.  When clecoing the tank together, I ran out of clecoes (you can never have enough clecoes) so I had to scavenge some clecoes the wing skins at strategic locations.  Looking at the picture, I wonder why I ran out of clecoes???  Cripes, there is a lot of clecoes holding the wing structure together at this point.

I am also getting a good fit here on the top side of the wing.

Not much to report regarding forward progress on the plane.  After drilling holes for the better part of yesterday, I spent a couple of hours deburring the following parts:

✓ Lower wing skins (debur)
✓ Fuel tank / Leading edge joint plate (debur and dimple)
✓ Leading edge skins and ribs (debur)

For the leading edge, I also drilled out for the plate nuts that will eventually be used to mount the fuel tank with.  Not real exciting stuff here.  Only one picture today.

Tami got back after spending the weekend with my sisters and mother.  Another one of them "girls weekends".  That makes two in a row for her.

As I figured, she spent the majority of the weekend shopping with my sisters.  That is it... She is grounded from "girls only weekends" (at least my shopping side of the family).

She sort of redeemed herself as she helped debur when she got home.  It sure makes that repetitive process go a little faster when she helps.  WooHoo.

I had decided to go with the capacitive fuel senders and I am getting close to working on the first fuel tank so I thought that I would take a look and see what parts were included with the kit.  This sure looks like a lot of parts just to indicate fuel tank level.  After looking the print over, I decided to shelf the fuel tank for the night and work on the leading edge instead.

I dimpled the leading edge skin.  This went pretty well.  Tami was planting flowers so tonight was a one builder operation.  I knocked as many dimples out as I could with the pneumatic squeezer and what I couldn't get with the squeezer, I had to break out the C-frame for.

I have decided to prime the inside of the wing skins.  I just can't believe that it would add any more than a couple of pounds to the overall weight.  My wing skins are flawless for scratches at the moment, however, the leading edge and the joint plate got scratched when fitting everything together.  That said, I got the leading edge remaining parts alumiprepped and alodined.  I will try to prime the parts tomorrow if the temperature is not to miserable.  It is supposed to be in the 90's and it is only April.  YUK!!!

Today, was all about drilling holes. I didn't plan on drilling all day long, but that is how it turned out.  I had to back track a little and re-drill a new root rib z-bracket.  I accidentally drilled the original root rib z-bracket for plate nuts.  As soon as I drilled it, I realized my mistake.  Anyway, I needed to re-mount the leading edge and fuel tank so that I could finish drilling the W-423 joint plate to the fuel tank so I guess I am going to kill two birds with one stone here.

In the picture below, I drilled the fuel tank skin to joint plate holes with a #19 drill bit.  I then used the black clecoes to hold it together.  This process was pretty straightforward.

After I finished drilling the new root rib z-bracket and the fuel tank to joint plate holes, I then began the long process of drilling all the holes in the leading edge to final size (#40).

I also final drilled the fuel tank holes to final size with the tank still on the spar.  Leaving the tank on the spar, made for easy access to all of the fuel tank holes.  This is in contrast to Van's instructions.  I DID NOT, however, drill any of the holes for the tank skin to rear tank baffle while the tank was still mounted on the wing.  I didn't want to accidentally drill into the main spar.  To finish those holes, I removed the tank from the wing spar and set it in the cradle.  Again, this was straight forward and just took a while to drill what must be some 400+ holes.

Then it was on to drilling the holes that will be used to attach the tank to the main spar plate nuts.  The instructions has you drill the holes out to #19.  The tank skin is not supported by anything around these mounting holes so when you try to run the drill bit through the holes, all it wants to do is chatter.  Before I "bugered" (scientific term ya know) up any holes, I clamped a 1" x 3" piece of scrap wood to the tank skin.  This worked great and only took a couple of seconds to clamp to the skins.

After what felt like drilling for an eternity, I began fabricating the fuel tank stiffeners.  Since the fuel tanks can hold over 120 pounds of fuel (each), the skins are re-enforced on the bottom side of the tank.  It is hard to tell in the picture, but there are 4 different sizes of stiffeners in the tank.  I thought that maybe Van's made a mistake because it looked like there were only two different distinct rib spacing in the tank.  When I went to install the stiffeners, sure enough there are 4 different rib spacing dimensions in the fuel tank.  it was very subtle.

Believe it or not, this took me a good 9+ hours to get this done.  Tomorrow, I think that I will try to debur and dimple the leading edge.  I think that I may finish the leading edge before tackling the tank.  Decisions, decisions...