Left Fuel Tank Sealing

A few days ago I started the nasty process of sealing the left fuel tank.  I'm sure by the time I'm done with the second tank I'll have figured out how not to get proseal on absolutely everything, but in the meantime, what a mess.  There is just no controlling that stuff!  I did one rib with the intention of wet riveting it like Van's explains, but that turned out to be a nightmare.  For a novice, it's just too hard to get a good shop head when the rivet is buried under slime.  You can't see the rivet head after it's set either.  That made me really uncomfortable, since I could never really be sure that the rivet was good.  I'm guessing that it doesn't really matter, considering the proseal would probably hold things together even if half of the rivets were bad. Still, I like to be able to see the rivet heads and know that they are acceptable.  So, after a half dozen rivets in the wet proseal, I abandoned that approach in favor of the dry riveting technique that I've read about.  For this method, instead of putting proseal on and riveting everything together while it's wet, you simply cleco everything together (clecos in every single hole to try to pull things together as tightly as possible), let the proseal cure for at least a day and then rivet.

The dry riveting technique proved to be much easier and a much less stressful.  Even though it's slightly less messy, I'm still glad that nobody will ever see the inside of the tanks!  As neat as I try to be, proseal is next to impossible to keep tidy.  I'm sure if I taped everything off I could make it look a lot nicer, but I don't really see the point.  The sealing works the same whether there's a straight line of proseal or if it looks like a toddler did it.

After I riveted the first rib together, I moved on to putting proseal on two more ribs.

The last step for the previously riveted rib was to encapsulate each rivet head in proseal.  That sounds easy enough, but once again, it's impossible not to make a mess doing it.  By the time I was done, my neat little blobs on each rivet head were smeared all over the place.

So now I wait a day for the proseal to cure on the two ribs I just did.  You can see how much proseal the clecos push back through the holes.  Imagine that being a rivet.  Luckily, after a day of curing, the proseal is just dry enough that you can take the clecos out and just pull the tacky proseal out of the hole.