WOW, I had a great thought. What if you could put the wife in it and get rid of them both!!! Ok, that’s my fantasy...
Sounds like a boat. The best two days of owning it or the day you buy in the day you sell it.
On a serious note, if there’s no corrosion on the tanks I don’t know why you would replace them. I had to go through the diesel tanks on my F250 a short while ago. It’s sat for a couple of years while my leg was injured. The gas gauges were kind of funky. When I dropped the tanks and pulled the fuel suction lines and sending units, they were a little corroded and gummy. It’s fairly easy to pop off the cover of the sending unit, and very gently clean the coil, but more importantly I used a tiny Dremel moto tool wire brush and I took all the corrosion off the steel housing that the Contact rides on. I secured them back with tiny zip ties.
I also replaced the pick up screens. Sending units were about $100 each, so I saved that and the screens were only about 10 bucks as I recall. Still working perfectly. I enhanced the grab of the new screens by putting a hose clamp around where it slides on the metal tube. There has been a problem with some of them falling off, and you lose a third of your tank capacity.
I never did it before, but now I swear on Seabreeze. If you Google “hot soak with Seabreeze” you can see how to put it in the gas tank at a certain point, run the truck a little bit so It gets sucked up into everything, let it sit for a while, and then run the truck to run it out of the system. Again mine is a diesel, but after I did that, it’s the best its run in 15 years.
Getting started, Ford has these funky quick disconnect fittings that you have to use a little special tool to pop loose. I struggled with it for days and read online where a lot of other guys struggled with them for days. Then I read that if you soak them with penetrating oil, they’ll work properly. So I soaked them with the penetrating oil and let them sit a couple days. I had beat my hands up in the tight quarters trying to get them loose. After spraying them and waiting a couple days, they popped loose so quickly I banged the other side of my hands!
While you’ve got the gas tanks out, it’s always advisable to replace the vent tube, they get stiff and they shrink. And if it’s like mine, on the end of the vent tube there’s a little plastic fitting that has the pinhole to vent the tank. I read many guys drill out that pinhole just a hair bigger, and then they make sure they hang the vent were no mud or dirt will get into it. So you use a little bit more line, I used vacuum tube, and I relocated the vent a little higher.
When I pulled my tanks, there was some trash in them that can be hard to reach. I stretched out a coat hanger and wound around a crumpled up old face cloth, and used it like a mop to reach into the tank and wipe out all the goo and liquid stuff. After the tank was free of vapors, with some PVC pipe, I rigged up like a 3 foot long snorkel for my shop vac, and I easily cleaned everything out of the tank.
I’m in Atlanta so rust isn’t really a big issue, but whenever I do anything like this, especially if it’s not seen, wherever there’s a rub point or wherever there’s any surface rust, I clean it up and then I bathe it in rustoleum.
oh, and I used about a 3/8” x 3 or 4 foot piece a vacuum hose to siphon the old fuel out of the tank’s. That kind of hose always has a curve in it. If you keep track of that curve as you put it in the tank through the fill neck, you can get it right down to the bottom and actually pull out 99% of the fuel before you take the tank down.
And just a general statement, if you don’t hit your head on the frame or the trailer hitch about 10 times, and if you don’t bleed, you’re not doing it right. And you’re only allowed to say “ouch“ if you bleed...
Good luck, sounds like a great project and a fun toy!
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