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Pre 3B wing tank drawing?

blaplante

Well Known Member
Can anyone send me a drawing of the pre-3B wing tank? Helping on a restore of a 3A, and the tank doesn't seem the same as shown as in the current 3B drawing 12.

Thanks, Bryan
 
Could be wrong, but never saw drawings of pre-RV-3B wing tanks. Drawings show a 25 gal fuselage tank.

Finn
 
Pre 3B wing tanks

No pre-3B wing tanks...?

Well, I find that hard to believe since Van's RV-3 spar mod instructions CN2 for the pre 3B wing explicitly mention how to do it with wing tanks vs. fuselage tank. Why would they mention wing tanks if the pre-3B didn't have (except by builder customization) wing tanks?

Definitely finding this project difficult. No period plans, build instructions, and the guys at Van's support joined the company decades after the 3. A real lack of build photos online for any of these early planes. So you look at something and say, boy is that weird. But trying to figure out if it is weird and to plans vs. weird because the builder went off plans is a struggle.
 
Wing Tank Drawings

I looked up in my "history" of the -3 and found in that Van makes mention of a "wing tank option" and how popular it had become in the RV3 Newsletter #8 - December 1975.

The drawing for the wing tanks for my Serial Number 11226 - circa 1993, were finished (in the title block) on 1-10-74. So the tanks have been around since (almost) the very beginning.

The Drawing Number for the Wing Tank(s) is #12

YMMV

HFS
RV4 S/N 1136 Flying/Sold
Harmon Rocket II S/N 002 Flying - 18+ years
RV3 S/N 11226 Building
 
My old RV-3A had wing tanks and I think I still have the plans around here somewhere. I’ll look later.
 
RV-3 wing tanks

I have the cd from Van's with refernces to the wing tanks on numerous pages: 4, 12, and 35. I also have some of the tank parts. Contact me if you are interested in the parts. Jon
 
Super!

This is great! It confirms that earlier designs did not have the Z brackets on the back of the tank and were held on entirely by screws and the leading edge to fuselage bracket. So the tank is just getting hung up on the countersinks interlocking with one another.


OK, I was wrong.

Here it is attached.

Sorry uploading doesn't work.

Won't accept .tif file.

I'll try to put it on my Google Drive

https://drive.google.com/file/d/18kejjS24G7K-MgyVdw8wobGnxz7jp8fl/view?usp=sharing


Finn
 
You're welcome.

However, I'm concerned about the note about notching the spar to make room for rivets. The builder of my RV-3 discarded the wings that came with the project because of those notches and ordered QB RV-3B wings for it.

I guess if you're replacing tanks on an existing RV-3 it's not an issue, but certainly an inspection point (to make sure the builder didn't overdo it).

Finn
 
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