Baby Ringmaster fever

Jim the best way to deal with this is to alter the rib bay along side of the fuse. Do whatever you need to do in order to get a tank into the wing.  Here's a pic of my all time favorite 1/2A which is the Baby Tomahawk by Dumas. I built this plane 36 years ago and even though I have obliterated it a dozen times, it was what taught me how to build tanks and what was needed to do in order to make them work. While I learned many lessons, I kept smashing the plane until I finally got it correct.  While I knew better back then not to drill through the leading edge, I did it anyhow but I do have a piece of ply epoxied onto the back of it prior to drilling out the hole for the pickup. Today, I would replumb the tank as I always do and the fuel pickup would be on the bottom.  Here's a pic, I used silicone to hold the tank in, the tank bay was fully sealed  prior to tank installation.



       Now if I was to redo this plane today, not only would I reconfigure the tank differently, you can see the piece of brass tubing on the wing. The tubing I have laying on there represents where the fuel pickup should be. In other words, the tank currently while it does work, theoretically it should be considerably inboard more. This is why TD also don't draw fuel correctly on profiles, the pickup due to tank design is too far outboard causing a automatic lean condition. I'm using engine offset to kick the venturi further outboard to assist in getting it inline with the pickup.  It's better for any profile to utilize a longer narrower tank vs one that's short and wide as this places the pickup too far outboard compromising fuel draw.