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I worked on the (old) Beetle after work today. Whoo!
The fuel tank in my car has been a problem since I bought it. There's a slight gas smell, that gets stronger just after you've turned left. The guy I bought it from said it just needed a new gas cap. That turned out not to be the problem. I've done lots of stuff, but really, the gas tank needs to be taken out of the car and sealed to protect it and hopefully plug any pinhole leaks that have developed.
Underneath the right front side of the car, right behind the right front wheel, the outlet from the tank goes to a filter and then to the tube that runs down the center of the car and delivers it to the left rear.
Yesterday I removed the filter and drained the gas out of the tank.
In an attempt to contain the spot of the pinhole leak, I sprayed expanding foam all over where the input pipe joins to the main tank body. Still had smells. Here's that area as it looked in March, with most of the foam still there.
In addition to freeing the tank itself from its connections, I needed to remove some extra electronics. Here's the relay that I installed to make the buzzer work--and as I've circled, I soldered the silly thing to the car. That wasn't bright.
The filler spout with most of the foam cleaned out.
Here's the tank out of the car.
Tanks supposedly have a finger strainer at the outlet of the tank to try to prevent chunky things getting into the fuel system. Here's the outlet area of the tank. The outlet (where the output hose was connected) is circled in red. The other circle shows a plug of some sort with a Hex (Allen wrench) drive in the center.
The reason this is puzzling was because I thought the inlet for a tank is supposed to look like this, where green is the filter screen and red is the nut that holds it together.
Well, I think I figured it out. I wasn't able to get a photo, since the filler hole is too small, but I could see with my eyes and a flashlight the way the outlet is set up in the Superbeetle tank (strainer, slipped over the end of the feed pipe is green, the plug is red:
I think that the plug is just inside where the finger strainer is, so you can remove the plug at replace the strainer if need be. I will need to remove it to seal the tank.
Here's the tank taped up and waiting for further work.
