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On the subject of fuel setup, Tom Giddings makes a good point about several
people who have flown with the tanks unbalanced successfully. Orin
(Lancair's tech rep.) was the one who told me the story about tank
imbalance. I called him today and re-quizzed him. He says you can fly 95% of
the time with one tank dry and one wet. There are flight conditions though,
where he says where tank imbalance can make the plane very dangerous to fly,
such as landing or low speed. it seems though like the tank-trick could
happen to anyone, since most of us manually select our wing tank anyway.

I have heard that if you go to a 3/8" line, that the engine driven fuel pump
can draw from your wings. can it draw though a short section of 1/4" line? I
was considering moving my fuel pumps to the stub wing, going from tank to
pump (8") with the 1/4" line, then increasing to 3/8 " to the fuel select
valve.

I plan to keep the header tank dry most of the time.  is the amount of fuel
carried in the wings too little to be practical? I would be interested in
hearing from anyone else who has tried this or anything like it.

also, has anyone heard of using float shutoff valves to keep the air out of
the lines? that way you could select "both" for the wings. sounds like it
would remove a lot of hassle. I wonder if there is an aircraft grade float
valve, like the ones in our carbs, that could shut off the flow when the
fuel was gone.

here is a drawing of my idea:

lefttank---pump---floatshutoff------T----floatshutoff---pump---rttank
                                   |
                                   |
                header tank------valve----------gascolator


please tell met what you think.

Scott