Mouser NerdBot's photostream  

There's been a lot of changes since last month's version of this diagram (for once)! There is essentially no red in the wings anymore, meaning that everything is either ready for priming or already primed. The only exceptions to this are 2 pieces of remaining trailing edge extrusions to be countersunk, a couple of aileron actuation parts, and I still need to dimple several pieces of wing skin.

Furthermore, there are almost no white parts in the wings, meaning that I've worked on just about everything. The only exceptions to that are the wingtips, the aileron hinge weldments, and the fuel tank vent tubes. There's even a little bit of new green appearing in the left fuel tank! yay.

All of the orange stuff, awaiting primer, will probably get put off until the weather gets a little warmer so I can do it outside. In the meantime, I'll keep assembling the fuel tanks which should take some time.

Parts shown here in green are complete, yellow are awaiting some final riveting or blending tasks, orange are awaiting primer, and red are works in progress. Uncolored parts haven't yet been worked on.

Here's the inside view of the inspection port cover plage and its five nutplates. I'm going to give the screws and nutplates a more thorough coating of sealant, I just ran out of working time on the sealant I was using tonight before I could get them covered.

In a stock RV-10, this port is where the fuel level sensor mounts. I'm using capacitive sensors that mount differently, so I fabricated this little plate and just sealed it into place. There should never be a need to look inside the tanks, so this should never come off. I still need to go over the screw heads with some sealant to just to be extra-sure about leaks...

The five sealant-covered rivets at the top of frame are holding on the flange that attaches to the fuel lines which supply fuel from the tank to the engine.

I'd like to take this opportunity to apologize to all of my regular flickr stream viewers for all of these horribly obtuse images of rivets.

Anyway, this one isn't going to leak, obviously.

There are tooling holes in all of the rib pieces that the hydroformer uses to align the pieces prior to bending up the flanges. Unfortunately, tooling holes in the outer surface of a fuel tank are a Bad Idea(tm). Van's recommends fabricating small plates to cover these holes and riveting them on with lots of sealant. I found that an AN470AD6-7 rivet fits in there perfectly. I just coated the shaft of the rivet in sealant, pounded it into position like this, then wiped off the excess sealant on this side and covered the inner shop head in a big dollup of sealant. Minimal weight, aesthetically unoffensive.

Not that aesthetics should matter here, since this face isn't visible once the wings are attached to the plane anyway... but I'm anal that way.