You just don’t want to hear what I’ve been through to get to this point. What you want are the results and maybe something helpful if you are a builder, right?

I again confirm I have  leaks in my left strake as you see above. The #1 method for finding this was to hire an aircon guy who has the right gas and lines. We got some traceable gas into the strake at about 10″ of pressure. His sniffer immediately found two leaks and the rest seems good.

Yes I tried other people, bought a dye kit, waited days for others, found connection issues and on and on the circus went. Yes I did old school soapy water without success first, of course. Oh thats right, you don’t want to hear about the last two weeks.

Tonight I went to fix the biggest leak. The method I’m using is to pull a consistent vacuum of about 8″ with my shop vac gaffered to the removed fuel drain plug (outlet). Watching the manometer I found a spot where it has a reasonable pull.

Where the leak was I got the dremel out and made a bigger access hole. It was right were the magnetometer wires entered the fuselage, of course. No modification goes un-punished.

I then mixed up some fuel safe epoxy and got some in the hole only to see it slowly get sucked in. I kept adding and it kept slowly sucking. My idea is that plenty of epoxy should be coating the pathway through the foam to the outside world. After a fair bit went in and disappeared I made some sloppy flox. That was then applied and it slowly moved into the hole. Finally I made some stiffer flox and let that get sucked in until it didn’t want to do any more.

That I hope will do the job. I put some peel ply of the outside and turned off the vacuum. After cure we will see how it went.

There is a second leak would you believe right where the internal box was made to hold this magnetometer? More modification punishment. Somewhere in the box walls. I may be getting the aircon man back to pinpoint it. His sniffer was acting up and a new tip is needed apparently. First up we will see if the major leak is plugged.