fuel tank pre-lim and Nose skin wrapping

Seems like it took forever for Saturday to get here, despite being off work on Easter Monday.

I decided to pull out the fuel tank side for the right wing and start test fitting the finger strainer.  Fuel tank assembly will have to be done soon.   If you recall from when I made the tank sides, I made sure to mark the location of the fuel outlet hole.  Shown below is the outside of the tank wall.  The flange on the tank actually faces outward for welding:

The finger strainers I was given are actually the large size, the plans call for small or regular size.  This doesn't change anything with regards to operation, the fuel lines will still be the same size.

I placed the finger strainer directly over the outlet port mark and it will fit fine (it's facing the wrong direction in the picture, the mesh goes inside the tank):

Here is a better look after I flipped over the tank side (now showing the inside of the tank wall):

The welding flange that the finger strainer screws into is too wide to fit and keep the strainer close to the bottom edge of the tank.....

Here the complete assembly roughly laid out.  The strainer screws in through the threaded mount flange from the other side with just the mesh  inside the tank:

If I trim off a bit on the bandsaw I can get it even closer to the bottom of the tank and still leave enough for welding and threading in the strainer.  This will be done when I get the rest of the fittings for drains, etc., and I can assemble the tanks for welding.

Picked up some new ratchet straps and started the process to wrap the nose skins:

This is a very familiar process which i used on the horizontal stab, flapperons and slats.  Long boards help spread the wrapping force equally across the skins:

I still need to figure out how I'm going to cut the slots in the nose skin for the slat brackets.  The one at root is exposed so I'm going to use it as the example and copy the measurements across to the other three moving outboard from the root.  It will take some time, but I'm confident it will work.

This was my first chance to see if the template I made for the outboard nose skin matched up to the wing tip.  ​Here is a look at the wingtip in place.  The curving edge of the nose skin fits very well!

I still need to trim the upper skin still and the trailing edge to match properly.  Again, the template I made is a great help:

I still need to finish drilling the nose skin at the spar, but the outboard double ow of rivets on the spar tip is done to A3.  I also have the first rivets in the nose ribs along the nose skins.  I have enough in there now to release the ratchet straps:

The long boards will stay in place for now until I finish drilling out the nose skin/ribs and at the spar.  But it looks even more like a wing now!

More to come!  Thanks for following along!