Well, I had originally planned to try and fay seal the left tank stiffeners tonight. But fire, I needed to clean up stuff from the last session, and I also wanted to be prepared to make use of any extra sealant after the stiffeners were done. Last time I did the fuel cap flange that way. This time I wanted to have some other stuff ready, so I decided to prep the left tank pickup and the cover plate it’s mounted to. Well, that turned into a sort-of long odyssey of looking up proper torque specs for AN nuts, getting the anti-rotation bracket positioned correctly, discovering the holes between the bracket and the cover plate were the wrong size, so forth and so on.
I’d already gotten kind of a late start, and by this time I’d been out there almost an hour. I figured that there was a good chance I’d spend as much as two hours sealing up the stiffeners and everything else, which would put me finishing up near midnight. So I decided to abandon the sealing plans and instead get everything cleaned up, then I worked on some remaining scuffing work, mainly on the baffles. I put my abrasive wheel in the drill press and tried working on the ribs, but I found it difficult to control the thing and rapidly got frustrated. I’ll maybe figure out a different strategy for those another time.