Well, finally finished the tanks. They both re-pressure tested fine with no problems. Seeing how it's a fairly nice day I decided to get them primed/sealed. Normally I wouldn't do this yet but I felt it was needed for two reasons.
One I wanted to get them protected because of all the sanding I did on them. Other parts are alodined and they have the pure aluminim layer intact on the surface so they will be fine until I paint the whole ship.
The second reason was I wanted to see how all the finish work I did would look under paint. Not bad, not great. These were more difficult than normal because I used epoxy rather than polyester filler because of them being fuel tanks. The epoxy should give a little added protection against leaks.
All in all they turned out ok. Some sags and stuff but the goal was to get them protected, not to a finish coat. This primer has to be sanded anyway if you don't topcoat within 2 days. The PPG DP40 epoxy primer is a good product but really demands a good gun. For the couple of quick jobs like this that I have I'm using a crappy Wagner HVLP gun. Don't even know what the tip size is. If I decided to ultimately paint myself, I'll probably pick up a SATA gun.
