Hi Ron, I'm one of the folks in the other camp.I have the wing tanks made from vinyl-ester and never a lick of trouble. The header tank is made from safety-poxy if memory is correct. (Steve Glover may correct me) It was a purchased part from RR in 2000. I put 5 gal of sunoco ultra 93 containing ethonol (figured what could it hurt for a short duration) in late one Sunday evening while trying to get home from somewhere and missed the FBO closing by a few minutes. It mixed with several gallons of 100LL in the header tank and I burned down to about 4 gallons remaining to get home. I did notice that it did not mix well and stratified between fuels in the tank. It was in there about a week maybe less before I flew again and burned some more of it off and then filled up again. Another couple weeks came and went and the the throttle started sticking and a slight roughness. I thought it was cable adjustment so I went to check on it and found a tanish gummy coating on the interior of the carb. I took the carb off and discoverd a coating though out the intake mmanifold tubes with some actual runs like a paint run would look like inside. It took a few minutes for me to realize what was happening and I pulled the header tank and found that the lower half of the tank interior had erroded the Safety-poxy coating off and actually could see fiberglass hairs exposed. The line of errosion was very difinitive right at the level that fuel had sat for the less than week. I had to cut into the lid of the tank and sand and clean and recoat, patch the top back inn and a tremendous amount of cleaning to clean up the carb and intakes. I go to the extreme to make sure I do not ever have to put ethonol in this plane again. I have tried mogas without ethonol but my set up does not really like it.
----- Original Message ----- People on the KRNet make a fuss about using only vinyl-ester, but unless you are planning to run alcohol contaminated fuel, epoxy tanks really aren't an issue. I built my tanks with Saf-T-Poxy 20 years ago, then sloshed them with and alcohol resistant sealer. I have always run Mogas when I could, and for the last 4 years have been running mogas almost exclusively. I have never had an issue with the tanks or any degredation of the slosh compound in 20 years and well over 1100 hrs of service. -Jeff Scott Los Alamos, NM ----- From:?"Ronald Wright via KRnet" <krnet at list.krnet.org> To:?KRnet <krnet at list.krnet.org> Subject:?KR> wing tank building material Is there any way to determine whether the wing tanks in an already skinned wing were built using vinylester instead of epoxy? A KR builder has a set of wings with Diehl skins already built. Older wings apparently off of what was a flying airplane, but NO information about what was used to build the fiberglass tanks? The wings are marked: 100LL ONLY. So, maybe they weren't built using vinylester?? I don't want to chance buying the wings without knowing what I'm getting!! Thanks, Ron _______________________________________________ Search the KRnet Archives at http://tugantek.com/archmailv2-kr/search. Please see LIST RULES and KRnet info at http://www.krnet.org/info.html. see http://list.krnet.org/mailman/listinfo/krnet_list.krnet.org to change options To UNsubscribe from KRnet, send a message to KRnet-leave at list.krnet.org
