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Safeair er tanks

My RV-3A has the standard 24 gallon fuselage tank. I added integral wingtip tube tanks. They hold 7 1/2 gallons each or 15 total. It has greatly improved cross country trips with increased range or the ability to tanker fuel for cost savings.
 
Extended Range Tanks

I like having extra gas on board. Having said that, I don't want to be a wet blanket on this idea Bill, but my experience with these safe air wing tanks in my RV-4 was mixed.

I did love upping my fuel capacity from 32 to 40 gallons. It was nice if I flew 3 or more hours on a leg to still have around 8- 10 gallons reserve fuel. The downside was weight and complexity. I used two facet pumps to facilitate the transfer of each safe air tank to my main tanks. In 10 years time I had 3 pump failures. This was a pain because I had to drain the tanks on that side, then dig in to where they were placed near my wing root to replace the bad pump. As has been stated above, complexity increases points of failure.

I noticed some builders of other Vans planes just used an additional wing bay when building their fuel tanks. More capacity, no more parts to break/fix later. That's what I'm doing this time round. Added about 10 gallons per side. At my home field we pre-buy gas at about 15 cents over cost (3.38 recently), so I'll be a tanker when I leave. I expect I can darn near do an 800 mile round trip :)
 
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Just one perspective here Bill from someone who has been flying their -10 with for several years with the standard tanks, mostly on long cross country flights (in the literal sense of cross-country!). I recently completed a 5.5 hour leg and landed with an hour of fuel remaining. We routinely fly 5 hour legs. When flying more locally, I usually keep the takeoff fuel down at 30-40 gallons because there is no reason to haul all that extra fuel around. So, extra tanks are not something I would worry about.
 
Nothing particularly wrong with expanding stock tanks, but don't forget the spin recovery risk if you and the plane are into acro. The primary reason I chose to separately wet the outboard leading edge was to minimize weight gain & keep acro in the equation (-7).

Charlie
 
My tanks came to me prebuilt

... so I won't be doing that extended-bay thing.

The comments about long flight legs with standard 60 gallon fuel are in alignment with my expectations from what I've read here about LOP 65% cruise as well as full rich climb and time-to-climb to cruising altitude. The consumption just isn't that bad, and the plane's endurance easily exceeds pilot and wife's comfort on that kind of leg time.

I have pretty much decided this is a relatively easy mod to do, if desired, after I gain some flying experience, with only the paint job really at any risk of ill effects from doing it then vs. now.
 
I have been struggling with adding the safe air tanks. My typical mission is from stl to pgd which is 5 hours no wind. I took a look at all of my log data for flights over 2 hours for the past 3 years. I typically fly 8-13k ft WOT LOP. My average fuel burn rate from takeoff to touchdown was 10.9 gph. my average TAS ranged from 165 kts to 170 kts. Using 59 gal useable fuel, gives me a no reserve range of 5hrs 24min.

Andy, I am curious of your TAS at the 9 gph fuel flow you must be getting to achieve a 6.5 hr no reserve range
 
According to Van's website, if you slow down to 55% power, the -10 can stretch its range out to 1,000 miles.

My bladder hurts thinking about that.
 
Bill, on that flight we were running about 165 kts., and fuel burn was 9.2 gph. Much of the flight was at 12,000 ft or better, altitude matters. Here is a plot of our cross country flights where I graphed fuel efficiency (TAS / fuel burn) against altitude. Each point is a different flight, data averaged over a 30 min segment, constant conditions.

 
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