Petrol Tank is Out
Had the day off work today thanks to Labour Day (gotta love public holidays), so I decided to do a little work on the car. In preparation of a little panel beating that is required on the read end, I decided to take the petrol tank out today and to remove the exhaust clips so the exhaust could be moved out of the way.
First things first though, I had to empty the petrol from the tank. Penny and I used the car a bit before we retired her for the rebuild, so I expected the tank to be fairly empty. Not likely. It took about 6 3/4 full buckets to get the tank to the point that the majority of petrol (and hence weight) had been removed. And it was a messy affair. The petrol tank has a drain plug, which made the draining very easy. But trying to put the plug back in with petrol pouring out resulted in quite a bit of spillage.
Once the tank was mostly empty, I removed the straps that held the tank in place. By this time, my Brother and Dad had returned from visiting a previous owner of the car my brother has taken possession of and could give me a hand. The trickiest part of the removal was getting all of the hoses off. They were stuck on very tight. With the hoses off, the tank came out very easily.
With the tank out, we could hear a lot of muck in it. Dad and Anthony tried to get most of it out and did a pretty good job of it. But we could still hear something rattling around. We took out the sender unit so that we could light up the tank and see into it via the fill hole. We discovered a little chain in the petrol tank as the culprit of all the noise. The chain would have been the one that was linking the petrol cap to the car so that you would not lose it.
With the tank out, we are mainly focused on panel beating. There is also a little clean up that I can do (the contact glue).