To whoever is thinking about the wt. of the firewall,You might want to
hear what happened to me a few years ago.I fly an Ercoupe with the
original 5 gal. header tank up front,and whil flying along the shoreline
of Ct. one night,I began smelling what smelled like wood burning.No big
deal I thought because it was summer and I was only at 2000ft.and had
both windows down and I could see people on the beach with fires going
and thought that they were cooking hotdogs and such.It smelled kind of
good to me actually,until I saw the small flames coming from the floor
of the plane.I was alone so I steeped on the flame with my rt. fot to
try to keep it down while I got the fire exh.from the baggage area.As
fate would have it,the small push button on the exh. fell off and onto
the floor somewhere and I could not find it in the dark.I declared an
emerg.at hvn.and headed for it.I was able to keep the fire at bay by
steeping on it every few secs.I got close to the airport and while on
final,I cut the eng. off and glided down.After the fire dept. finished,I
found out that my exh.had broken and the eng. was blowing the hot gasses
directly onto the firewall and that had ignited the wood floorboards
causing the flames.It could have easily blown up the tank but I was
lucky.The exh. only had about 250 hrs.on it since new and I had done a
good preflight.I said all this so that you might make a wiser decision
on your choice of metal and where to put it.Good luck,Jim