This afternoon I was able to get a hold of Master Canardian Nick Ugolini and order a set of his Capacitance Fuel Probes.  Nick designed the probes himself to be used in canards and to link up to Princeton Fuel Probe electronics to provide high quality fuel reporting to EFISs, etc.

At first I resisted the idea of fuel probes since I already have Vance Atkinson’s fuel site gauges and will be using a fuel flow sensor.  But considering that these are just a few ounces a piece including the electronic control boxes, I figured knowing my exact fuel quantity for a total weight penalty of well under a pound was worth it.  In addition, I had just read too many reports extolling high praise for this system to ignore them all and not pull the trigger on a set. (I pulled the pics below off of Nick’s blog):

Another motivating factor for installing these probes early on (i.e. during the build) is that since I’m gearing up in the planning and R&D of my strake-building, it just makes sense that they’re a heck of a lot easier to install now during the initial strake construction vs. changing my mind and installing them after my strakes are all closed up.  Now, that being said, they actually don’t look to be that difficult to install after the strakes are built, but anything I can do to avoid introducing potential contamination–in the way of bits & chunks of foam & glass, etc–into my fuel system is worth doing early on.