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The engine's in my vintage beetle. It's working and running fine (aside from there being no gasoline in it).
The fuel tank is in, it's in great condition. It seals really well, which tells me that it wasn't sealing at all well before. Which is good news. The sealing process went very well and all the expansion chambers and vapor lines and stuff in the front of the car are sealed and working well.
HOWEVER...There are now two other problems with the car.
1) First, the vent problem. I suspect, now, that the vent system (that allows gasoline vapors from the fuel tank in the front to escape to be absorbed in a charcoal canister at the back) has been blocked in the car for a long time. The tank and expansion chambers in the front leaked enough that the tank never pressurized, so I didn't notice the vents not working (although I did notice the slight gas smell, which is what this is all about). (In fact, some of the leaks in the front system were probably initially caused by the vents becoming blocked).
Between the expansion chamber outlet vent at the right front port of the gas expansion chamber (just above the glove box), there are four sections of metal vent line that eventually connect to the charcoal canister in the back of the right rear fender. One metal line goes across the top of the luggage compartment to the left side, right over the fuse box (for those of you who work on vintage beetles, this is the one that's always getting in the way when you're working on the air box at the top of the luggage compartment). Then a flexible line runs down the left side of the luggage compartment and disappears under the edge of the gas tank. Somewhere down there it connects to another rigid line that ends up under the back of the right front fender. A very small fuel hose there makes the right-angle turn to join the rigid line that runs the length of the body to the front of the right rear fender. There's another short hose there that joins the last rigid line that arches inside the fender body and ends up close to the charcoal canister.
Working from back to front: the line that runs over the rear fender has a blockage near the front of the fender; this one should be easy to fix. The blockage is probably in some of the right angle turns as the line makes the transition to horizontal under the body. At the worst, I can cut the line inside the fender and run a slightly longer hose.
The horizontal line that runs through the body is clear (yay!).
There's a blockage somewhere the front two metal lines, or perhaps in the fairly long flexible line that joins them. I haven't tracked those down yet.
2) The second problem, which just cropped up today: The fuel delivery line that runs through the tunnel appears to be blocked. Argh, and also bugger. The irritating thing is that it's probably entirely my fault. The key thing about gasoline is that it's fairly volatile and fairly chemically reactive. It's only stable for a few months before it starts to break down; it breaks down much more quickly when it's exposed to oxygen. The three winters the car sat, the fuel tube through the center of the car wasn't a problem...but that's because in all previous instances, that fuel tube was full of fuel and thus didn't have any contact to the outside air.
Unfortunately, when I drained and pulled the fuel tank (in July or something this last year) I left the fuel tube plugged at the back, but when I disconnected the tank in the front, I left the tube open to the air. Which meant that starting in July, and going through a couple of weeks ago when I hooked the fuel system back up, that the worst-case scenario existed--a chamber, plugged at one end and open at the other, filled with non-stabilized gasoline. That meant that it would cycle air in and out as the temperature changed, bringing fresh oxygen, and allowing the more volatile parts of the gasoline to evaporate, leaving behind the cruddy stuff that was then free to oxidize and get nasty and stick to the insides of the fuel tube.
So now I'm reaping the rewards for that carelessness. I now have a car that runs, a fuel tank that holds fuel, but no way to get gas to the engine. Enough fuel got through that I was able to start and run the engine, but then apparently it blocked. Because I vaguely knew that the tunnel fuel tube would be a problem, I put fuel system cleaner in the gasoline that I was putting in the car. There may have been a partial blockage, and the cleaner dislodged enough cruddy stuff that it all piled together and got stock farther downstream at a partial blockage. Or something like that.
So on a weekend that I was planning to be recommissioning the car and possibly driving it a little on the road...I'm fixing things again.