This last week has been a marathon session of building. I have averaged 12 hour days in my activity, so not all of it will be shown in this log website. Photo 1 shows the rear control stick modified. With the auxillary fuel tank installed in the rear seat I could not flex the stick all the way back. I cut it off and added a sleeve to it. Photo 2 shows the installation of the sleeve onto the control stick. In photo 3 you can see the modified rear control stick installed in the cockpit. Now when I want to carry an extra 13 gallons of fuel, I just remove the control stick, place it into the holder clamps I will be mounting in the rear fuselage side, and hook up the fuel tank into the main fuel tank system. During flight I'll transfer fuel from the aux tank into the main tank using a Fawcet electrical pump. The 10 gallon main tank has a capacitance fuel gage on it so I can monitor the refueling progress as I fly along. This set up will give me a total of 23.0 US gallons useable for long distance flights. I plan to fabricate a removable mounting bracket that can be mounted over the top of the aux tank when it is installed to clamp a back pack of camping gear for the trip .... now to figure out where to store the fly rods ..... the back pack can hold up to 100 pounds of gear in addition to the fuel in the aux tank. That's a lot of fishing gear ..... :}
