Fixing fuel tank damage

[pitts12driver]

Much to my chagrin, a guest accidentally knocked my left wing of my RV7-A off of the sawhorses while we had it resting. The leading edge was dented along the second rib in from the root, and the rib has a small buckle. Clearly I need to do something, but I'm trying to understand my options.

1) Remove the skin from the tank, replace the 2nd rib, reskin. If this was a normal flying surface that would be my approach. However the tank sealant complicates that approach and I worry that it would be really difficult to get all the mating surface clean enough to reseal.

2) Build a new left tank. It's actually not that much work, but I worry that the project I took over is from 2009, and I have no idea if the current model pre-punched holes would remotely match all the nutplates already installed on the wing.

So, I'm not really sure how best to proceed. All constructive thoughts welcome

 

[PhatRV]

how much is the dent? Can you work it from the inside to reduce the amount of the dent? Are you okay with bondo the damage to mask it off after paint? I had a hangar rash on the leading edge of the LE aluminum toward the tip but I covered it off with fiberglass to match with the wing tip profile. You can always rebuild but RVs are designed to be repaired.
We have a local builder who bondo all the rivets of his RV to make it look like composite. This added weight but in your situation, bondo or other filler won't add that much compare to this builder.

 

[pitts12driver]

how much is the dent? Can you work it from the inside to reduce the amount of the dent? Are you okay with bondo the damage to mask it off after paint? I had a hangar rash on the leading edge of the LE aluminum toward the tip but I covered it off with fiberglass to match with the wing tip profile. You can always rebuild but RVs are designed to be repaired.
We have a local builder who bondo all the rivets of his RV to make it look like composite. This added weight but in your situation, bondo or other filler won't add that much compare to this builder.

We've worked the dent. It's actually cosmetically acceptable. It's more the buckle on the top of the rib that concerns me.

 

[PaulvS]

We've worked the dent. It's actually cosmetically acceptable. It's more the buckle on the top of the rib that concerns me.

It's hard to say without seeing a picture, but if the skin is acceptable then the rib can be replaced more easily than building a new tank. The rear baffle will need to be removed and once the damaged rib is removed the sealant can be scraped and cleaned off using Polygone. Methylene Chloride paint stripper will also work but it is difficult to obtain because of restrictions on its sale in the USA.
There are also methods of repairing a rib per AC43.13-1B.