I had been putting off working on the fuel tanks for the better part of 6 months, and coincidentally have had a container of proseal sitting in the fridge for about 6 months. The impeding expiration of the sealant has created the necessary inspiration to get this one finished.

Vans has created a wonderful walkthrough for tank construction here that has helped a lot with visualizing many of the steps as well as a bunch of good tips on technique.

First step was all the standard material prep. I took extra care on getting all the flanges at 90-degrees, and fluting to keep the rivet lines on the ribs as straight as possible.

When drilling out the strainer flange, it probably didn't matter that they are perfectly symmetric, but I clamped the L and R ribs together and drilled them as one. Dimpling the forward rib did indeed requires a pop-rivet style dimple die as documented.

I decided to prime every surface that is not internal to the tank, which included the outside sides of the solid ribs, the back side of the rear baffle, and part of the tank stiffener.

On to the proseal! First observation: while it is indeed super sticky and gets on everything if you let it, it's actually not that bad to work with, and does clean off quite easily with a little acetone. All together, I'm not sure why there is so much apprehension about it among builders.

I masked off all the surfaces to be scuffed, and started with the stiffeners, fuel cap, and drain fitting. Essentially using the technique described in the Vans video, everything went pretty much as expected with back-riveting. I did purchase this thin-nose yoke to make riveting the fuel caps easier. Not sure if it's quite worth $150 for setting 20 rivets, but I'm sure I'll have uses for it in the future. I really didn't want to use the rivet gun to set these with the skin being so floppy.

For sealing the shop heads, I didn't have any spare aluminum tubing as described in the Vans video, but I did have a hex screwdriver bit adapter that comes with every cheap set of drill bits that seemed to work just as well.