I’ve given the fuel system substantial thought. Several hours have been spent just pondering it! There are recommended ways and “rules” for everything to be done. From what I’ve seen there are plenty of people that depart from the rules and recommended ways! The fuel system is rather important so I intend to do it right.
The first “rule” I had to contend with was that the gascolator has to be the lowest point in the fuel system. This means it has to be behind the fuel valve. However, if you put the fuel valve where the designer recommends it, there’s not room for the gascolator at the same location.
After conferring with Mark Goldberg, I decided to fashion a mount for it near the flap handle. You can see in this picture my first rendition of this idea. I later built it with much thiner aluminum and moved the gascolator right to allow for line clearance.
You might be wondering why this fuel valve is backwards. I’ll get to that in a minute.
I settled on a SPRL fuel valve. It’s very smooth in operation and has positive locking positions that negate the need for a kick guard. It’s been recommended for Bearhawks and doesn’t have the “out” line exiting vertically like the Andair valves do. However, the SPRL “out” line exits forward. That might be fine for a nose dragger but not for a taildragger.
Which brings me to the second “rule” that I had to contend with – all fuel lines run down hill to the gascolator. Some people have just run a line out the front and back around the the gascolator but this breaks that rule. So I decided to mount the fuel valve backwards so the line exits at the rear and continues to flow downhill. I’ll have to figure a way to fix the labels, but I figured having a “correct” fuel system is more important than having to fix labels.