Ah, the 'Blue' Gas Shower!

[SkyKing]

GOOD Morning!

Yep, it's MORNING out here on the "Left Coast" and I haven't been to bed yet! You see, I decided to go flying late yesterday afternoon and flew over to Scappoose, Oregon to 'TOP OFF' my tanks with some of that cheap $1.82 a gallon blue juice. Flight at 5,000 with 27"/2300 RPM and 62 PPH was giving me a DME groundspeed of 166 knots -- good tail wind out of the North. Okay, so far so good. I land, pull up the pumps and the line boy hooks up the ground and I tell him I'll do the pumping. Fine. I fill the left wing first, bring it right up to the rim, filling slowly of course so that the inboard tanks fill to the top too. Then I do the same with the right wing. Just as I'm installing the cap, the line boy says, "Hey, you've got fuel running down the side of your plane!" Oh, GREAT! It was a real gusher. Poor selection of words... it was running all over the place, but primarily down the last window on the right side and all over the fuselage. Well, I needn't ask you... you've probably had one of those "blue showers" before... boy that stuff SURE singes the skin when it runs down into your tennis shoe! Anyway, what to do... the lineboy grabbed a Rubbermaid garbage can, one of those 35-gallon jobbies and we tried catching what we could in it, but since the dihedral of the wing was such, everything was running inboard first. I got out the trusty ratchet screwdriver and took those ga-zillion screws off the inboard panel thinking we might find the culprit on one of the two hoses... no such luck. The lineboy calls his boss while I hold absorbent paper rags to try and keep the gas from running down the side. As the boss arrives, a local A&P is behind him... I've already got the 5/8" socket and ratchet out from my on-board tool kit, clipped the safety wire on the inboard drainplug... and it just so happened that I had four of those 5-gallon red-plastic gas cans with me... the idea was after topping off, I'd take 4-jugs back home with me for later, since our airport still thinks their blue juice is better than all the rest of the airports, i.e., they charge WAY more! Well, as it turns out the AirNav page lists the fuel at Scappoose as a "SUPER DEAL" for $1.82, but then there's the fine print, which I didn't see... SO, with their Fed Excise Tax and State Tax, the price becomes $2.10! So much for the 'SUPER DEAL'. So, with a funnel and the four jugs we pull the drainplug and skim off 20-gallons of the 75 and with each 5-gallon jug being filled the leak stops... but only for a brief time. I borrow a 5th jug and take another 5-gallons out and that slows things to just an intermittant drip. So I told the mechanic, let's button her up, safety wire the drainplug and I'm outta here. Loaded the 5-jugs aboard ... a flying "GASCAN"... YIKES... I told the mechanic if he sees a Roman Candle he'll know what happened. I asked him if I owed him anything, he said no, so I handed him twenty bucks and told him to go buy a jug and enjoy himself. It was GREAT to have somebody come by to help out and I thought $20 bucks was the least I could do. And who knows, I might need his help again sometime. So, what me thinks is because I've not been keeping the tanks topped, generally running with 80-gallons (40 a side)maybe there's an inspection hole with a gasket on the top of the inboard tank that's let go - does that sound like a possibility? When I got back to the hangar it was about 9:30PM, so I got out the Kit Wax and attacked the paint and plexiglass and took all the stains off... for the most part it all cleaned up fine. Oh the landing... when I turned left base from the downwind, I really had to muscle it as that left wing was HEAVY! All the leaking seemed to subside, but there was still a persistent drop every minute or so, so I pulled the lower panels again so that it wouldn't leak against the fuselage, and then put another jug with a funnel up on a step-ladder to catch the drips until I can get my mechanic to come up and help me figure out what's going on. And here I thought with the fuel strainers all done (more on that later), things would be easy sailing! NO SUCH LUCK! Well, I see it's a little after 5Am and I'm pooped...since I don't want to wake up everybody with a shower, I did one of those washcloth cleanup numbers and I'm gonna sleep on the floor tonight with a sleeping bag cuz I still smell like a gas tank. With 25-gallons out and into the gas jugs and then a 10-gallon burn from the right tank on the way home, there's about 40-gallons, so I'm thinking with the way the fuel stains ran in flight... all from the inboard right tank... that it must be leaking from the top, in fact with the lower inspection panel off, when I put a mirror and flashlight up in there you can see fuel stains coming off the side in about the middle of the tank from the top side... I'll have to dig out the manuals later after my nap and see what's what.

Oh, what an absolutely 'FUN' day! Anybody else top their tanks lately and get a surprise like this?

SkyKing