Last time I filled the tank on the Piet, I noticed that the fuel float looked pretty gnarly. The float is a large cork that I coated in epoxy about 6 years ago. Until very recently it looked fine. Now the epoxy is breaking up, looking scaly like alligator skin; would hate to have a scale flake off and clog the fuel line:

I don't know what caused this. Last fall and over the winter I ran a lot of ethanol-free auto fuel, but most of this year I've run avgas. Also, I look pretty closely at the float every time I add fuel, so I don't know why the epoxy so suddenly started decomposing.

In addition to the float problem, the wire was getting rusty. It's just an old hanger that I rescued from the garbage, so it's semi-amazing it lasted this long before getting so rusty that even I started to have concerns about fuel contamination.

I considered just sanding off the old epoxy and resealing the cork with epoxy, but who's to say that the next tank of fuel won't start immediately damaging it?

We've done a lot of overseas traveling recently, and I recalled that Claudia had several "travel sized" toiletries (hairspray, bath beads, etc.) that are packaged in nifty little aluminum bottles that I thought might just make good fuel floats.

Rummaging around in the travel drawer, I found that the Molton Brown Seamoss Hydrasoak bath beads were occupying what was clearly an aluminum Pietenpol fuel float, so I transferred the beads to their proper container:

I clipped a wire hanger open and straightened it. I tested that the little bottle provided enough buoyancy for the weight of the hanger wire by placing the wire into the open bottle and then placing the bottle with wire into a glass of water. No problem. And yes, I know that the specific gravity of avgas is only 72% that of water and that therefore this was just a rough indicator whether the bottle will provide enough buoyancy. 

I was going to solder the wire into the bottle, but the little bottle came complete with a screwcap, which got me to thinking that maybe I could twist a loop in the end of the hanger wire, screw it down on the threads of the neck of the bottle, then screw the cap on, so that's what I did. Using a vise grip, I clamped the wire to a socket of much smaller diameter than the bottle neck. The socket was on an extension clamped into a vice, then formed it around the socket with my fingers:

Once that was all done, I used needlenose pliers to bend the wire up, over the cap, then up again:

I'm pretty sure that as bent, the wire will keep the cap from unscrewing. I'll keep an eye on it and if needs be will apply a little solder to secure it all. And that is NOT a glass of pastis sitting on my workbench next to the finished float.

Then, just for kicks, I did the water test again. Note that the wire is much longer than I'll need. Once it's clipped and thus weighs less, the little bottle should provide plenty of buoyancy in avgas. Total cost: $0.00. We'll see if it works.

And here it is the next day in a conatainer of avgas (note, that's some avgas with a fluorescent dye in it for other purposes; it's leftover and we use that stuff for the mower):

I kept it in the avgas over night, along with a bit of the hanger wire that I clipped off, and there didn't seem to be any softening of the paint on either the aluminum bottle or the hanger.

And here we see that the old cork float actually isn't as buoyant as the new aluminum float; it sits a bit lower:

I've now put about 45 flight minutes on the new float. Seems to be working well. So, I think I've come up with a minimalist solution to a potentially big problem.