Thread: Holed fuel tank problems

[b]<span style="color:blue">the only way to fix it is by brazing or welding it up.....


to weld up a fuel tank you need to remove first the fuel then the tank.....

sit it in the sun for a day so any remaining fuel will dry out/evaporate.....

flush out with water...lots of water....

then it will be safe to weld up the cracks/holes.....


(the procedure we were taught was to flush with water and then connect it to an exhaust pipe of a running engine for half an hour to get it hot and dry....
personally i dont like the thought of having all that exhaust soot in my tank......
let alone idling an engine for that long....)</span>

you can also fiil with water and then weld it as its the fumes that explode not the fuel or you can run a compressor with air running into the tank constantly

The only safe way is:

steam clean tank for 30 min.

fill with inert gas then weld.


you can also solder USE Heated iron not gas heated.

Michael.

It all seems too hard. Why did I have to ask?

HSV Rangie - are you suggesting using the solder with solder iron (electric) not gas, without first prepairing the tank as per the other posts? Still seems a bit dangerous to me.

Makes it a bit hard when the Rangie is my daily vehicle. Would probably be a lot easier to just replace the tank. It only takes a couple of hours.

I will have to think about this one.

Thanks for the advise.

Originally posted by juddo
It all seems too hard. Why did I have to ask?

HSV Rangie - are you suggesting using the solder with solder iron (electric) not gas, without first prepairing the tank as per the other posts? Still seems a bit dangerous to me.

Me too - and you won't do a reasonable job with the tank in place anyway.

The point is, the risk of igniting fuel is a lot less by using an electric soldering iron, but the consequences are the same if it does ignite.

Soft solder is unlikely to do a better job than the stuff you are using, particularly if the tank is cracking because of flexing (which sounds unlikely to me unless it was a substandard one in the first place), although a sweated on patch might work - but you won't do that with a soldering iron.

We got a crack in our fuel tank ( Plymouth station wagon ) while traveling through Mexico when I was a kid. This guy from a "garage" simply filled the tank with petrol then braze welded it.

As mentioned before, its the vapour which explodes and a full tank contains no vapour and no oxygen. The fuel that is leaking will catch fire, but you wont even notice with an oxy torch in action [img]style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/laugh.gif[/img]

We had a manual arts teacher who braze weld a empty and "clean" jerry can when I was at highschool. There was an almighty thump, the jerry can open up like a can of sardines and the teacher needed an emergency undy change [img]style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/biggrin.gif[/img]

Bruce.

Originally posted by BMac
We got a crack in our fuel tank ( Plymouth station wagon ) while traveling through Mexico when I was a kid. This guy from a "garage" simply filled the tank with petrol then braze welded it.

As mentioned before, its the vapour which explodes and a full tank contains no vapour and no oxygen. The fuel that is leaking will catch fire, but you wont even notice with an oxy torch in action [img]style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/laugh.gif[/img]

We had a manual arts teacher who braze weld a empty and "clean" jerry can when I was at highschool. There was an almighty thump, the jerry can open up like a can of sardines and the teacher needed an emergency undy change [img]style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/biggrin.gif[/img]

Bruce.

[b]<span style="color:darkred">this all makes sense.....
but you gotta leave any containers you are heating open...
they need to breath so they dont build up pressure
or they will explode like the jerrycan......</span>

Have a look at www.por15.com.au

I used the fuel tank repair kit on my rangie and it worked well. Don't know for how long as I've sold it now but it certainly stop the big leak for a month or so in th eheat of summer and it was pounded over a couple of hills in that time.

Worth a try.