Gas Tank Work
| In order to loosen the tank enough to slide it to the side to connect the return line, I needed to remove the spare tire carrier. The carrier is held in by two bolts in the front and a locking bolt in the rear.
When I went to remove the two bolts in the front I found that somewhere along the line the tack welded nuts inside the frame had been broken out, so the bolts just spun in place.
I had to buy some crowsfeet wrenches in order to get up inside the frame member. I finally was able to get the spare tire carrier out of the car, that was when I discovered that the gas tank had a patch in it.
Apparently the felt pad on the gas tank crossmember had warn through causing metal on metal rubbing. This created a whole in the tank that someone used a 1"x2" piece of metal and some caulking to repair. At this point I figured that if I was doing all this work to fix the fuel system I might as well replace the patched tank and the sender unit that read 1/8th of a tank to high, which was caused by 37 years of corrosion. I was warned that the exhaust system needed to be out of the car to remove the tank, but I thought I could just carefully manuever the tank to get it out. I was wrong of course. And since my exhaust system is welded all the way from the manifold to the tips, I only had one option. Cut out a muffler. This didn't bother me too much as I wanted to replace the exhaust system eventually, just not now.
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| These two pictures are of the new installed tank. I used thick rubber foam weatherstripping to pad the tank from the frame members. And an old innertube to pad the tank straps. The padding was probably a little thicker than it needed to be, therefore it was a little harder to get the tank straps to go around and tighten. The one strap had a stripped nut so I worked around that by putting a smaller bolt through the hole and double nutting it. The other strap just required a longer bolt to get started. The tank is now installed and filled with gas. It is nice to finally have a working fuel gauge.
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