Fuel Senders Calibrated and Other Stuff

Life got in the way of building since my last post and progress was slowed. I'm back to a normal routine and with it more productivity. My FAA registration card arrived in the mail. I'd heard it was taking upwards of 4 months for the FAA to process registration paperwork, but I got mine back in a little over 2 months. I need to get serious about acquiring flight insurance and have made inquiries to Falcon Insurance. They carry the policy for my builder's insurance. I got both boarding steps installed. Although optional on the taildragger I think they will be useful for children and women to avoid having people step on the flaps. I also installed the shoulder harness cables that the shoulder harness belts attach to. My panel rocker switches came with white lights, so I swapped them out for colored lights roughly organized for power, lighting, miscellaneous and blue for the boost pump because I just liked the color. The big task over the past two days was calibrating both my fuel senders. This was no small chore. I first had to buy 28 gallons of 100LL ($4.93/gallon) at my local airport. Thanks to my Dad I had enough containers to hold it all. From the local thrift store I bought two identical plastic 1 gallon beverage containers. I needed a way to safely add measured amounts of gas to each tank in a controllable way. I calibrated each container by accurately measuring 64 and 128 fluid ounces and marking the containers for accuracy. I also needed a way to safely remove fuel from the tanks. A simple syphon drained the majority and then I removed the drain sump to get the rest, letting it pour into a clean Home Deport bucket and then transferring that fuel back into the fuel containers. All fuel going into the tanks went through a fuel filter funnel to catch debris and water. Finally, I had to boost my tail up significantly, in a safe way, to achieve the level flight attitude where I need the fuel gauges to be accurate. The fuel calibration page on the G3X offers both flight and ground calibration modes. Since the 3-point ground attitude of a taildragger is considerably different from the flight attitude, the system lets you calibrate them each way so your gauges will be accurate both on the ground and in the air. The system is smart enough to know when you're airborne to transfer from one fuel model to the other. With my G3X in the fuel calibration mode I started adding fuel to each tank 2 gallons at a time. As the fuel float rose with each fuel addition the voltage displayed on the screen reduced. Adding fuel 2 gallons at time gave me multiple data points until reaching the full 25-gallon capacity and hopefully more accuracy. Not unexpectantly, my tanks showed full at 22 gallons, 3 gallons short of full. So, in flight with full tanks they'll show full until I burn down to 22 gallons and then the gauges will count down normally. The whole process required filling and draining each tank twice. The right sender seemed a bit finicky, and I ended up doing the right tank in airborne mode twice. Once the airborne modes were done, I lowered the plane to the ground 3-point attitude and did the whole process again. If I had an RV-14A tri-gear model doing them in ground mode would have been unnecessary. It took 2 solid days working alone but I got it done. The most critical point was at the end and saving the configurations on an SD card. That way If I have software upgrades or my system glitches, I don't have to repeat the process and can download my fuel files and any other custom thing I've done with my avionics setup.