Yikes.…

With visions of hear­ing her finally roar to life Paul and I came in this morn­ing, put 6 gal­lons of fuel in the tank and got busy check­ing minor details and then I smelled gas fumes.  The fuel tank was leak­ing at the con­nec­tion to the fuel line.  What we thought would be just a loose line con­nec­tion took the rest of the day with­out a good res­o­lu­tion.  So no start up today…

I can’t be sure, but I think there is a fit­ting miss­ing from the tank itself.  Much ear­lier we installed a new stain­less steel fuel line and it seemed to fit per­fectly into the tank.  The prob­lem seems to be that when the nut on the line is turned down into the fit­ting, the head of the nut shoul­ders on to the tank before a good com­pres­sion seal can be made allow­ing a very small leak that drips fuel.  We spent hours try­ing to solve this issue.….

At first I thought the flare on the new line had been dam­aged, so we re-flared it and tried again to no avail, with the tank in the car it is hard to really see what is hap­pen­ing.  We tried installing new and dif­fer­ent fit­tings and all of them seemed to have the same prob­lem, they would shoul­der on the tank before mak­ing a seal.  With no other options, we took the tank back out of the car and I still can­not get over the fact that the tank drain is not on the low­est point.  There is no way to com­pletely drain the tank by pulling the plug which is a bout 2 inches above the bottom.

Once out we are able to bet­ter visu­ally inspect the tank fit­ting.  It seems that it is not a com­pres­sion fit­ting at all, what we see is a fit­ting that has a pipe flared on one end inserted into the bot­tom of the tank to pick up the fuel from the bot­tom, so we are attempt­ing to mate two flared pipe ends together.  What I need is a fit­ting with a bul­let tip that is tub­ing thread that can insert into the tank fit­ting and com­press the flared pipe that is in there seal­ing it and then find a way to go from that fit­ting to a stan­dard 5/16″ com­pres­sion fit­ting so that the fuel line can attach to that.  If these fit­tings are not avail­able, the only other solu­tion will be to take the tank to some­one to have a new mod­ern fit­ting either welded or sol­dered into the tank.….

On the way home I stopped in at NAPA and Lonny and I spent 30 min­utes try­ing to resolve the issue going through box after box of fit­tings.  We finally found what may be a work­able solu­tion.  These guys at NAPA really rock, when I went to pay him, he told me to “have a nice day” and would not take any money.  The only bright spot to a really crappy day.

Share on Facebook