Critical mass of builders

Got a critical mass of builders together today to seal and rivet the left tank baffle and z-brackets. Captain John came up from Plymouth, and Antony Parchment came down from Maine to help out. Attaching the baffle is more complex than it appears, it was certainly handy to have two extra brains and two extra pairs of hands and eyes.

Antony is a whiz at proseal. I copied his process and have wasted a lot less material. Here he’s mixing up the first batch and loading up the large 60cc syringe we used to apply sealant to the skin and rib flanges. We followed Vans’ instructions here and everything seemed to work fine.

The Proseal wizard in action

Here’s the tank with sealant applied, just before the baffle was dropped in place. We followed Vans’ instructions, I really don’t have anything to add to the process except the syringe worked out really well. The local medical supply store probably wonders why I’m always there buying latex gloves and syringes…

Sealant applied to the tank

One word of caution, when you’re attaching the Z-brackets, check to make sure that they’re oriented correctly – it would be very painful to find out that one Z-bracket was on backwards after the tank was complete! Just to be sure, all three of us checked the brackets with the plans before we pop-riveted them in place.