Site Navigation:
Craig's twitter feed:
Tweets by @gevmage
I didn't accomplish anything with the Old Beetle today, but I built a tool. I recently speculated about the structure of the pick-up at the bottom of the tank (my car is a "Super-Beetle", which makes everything in the front end of the car a bit different).
Now that I have the gas tank out, I'm going to rinse it, clean it, etch it, and then seal the inside of tank to try to plug any pinhole leaks and make it less suceptible to rust. In between filling it with various solutions, it needs to sit and drain. The only real outlet that the tank has that it will drain properly from is the drain plug at the bottom of the sump, that I talked about in the earlier post. But the tank is funny-shaped on the bottom, so it won't sit on the ground in such a way that it will drain properly.
So...I built a stand to hold the tank to drain, out of chunks of 2x4 and 2x6:
The point is that the sump, the lowest part of the tank, is at the bottom when the tank is on the stand, and that I can get to the plug hole to plug it or unplug it as needed:
Here's the sump again, showing the hidden outlet tube:
The tube at the right is where fuel exits the tank. The point of the take-up tube is just inside the drain plug hole, normally covered by the wire mesh screen.
Looking into the drain plug hole, here's the end of the pickup tube:
Here's the tank plug and the filter screen (including inset showing the texture of the screen):
At this point, I'm closed to doing the cleaning and etching process. I want to do that all at once to minimize rust I'll be creating.