Emptying the Fuel Tank

So this is what I started with: a bucket, a pair of rubber gloves and a can to bail out the tank. What was coming out the the tank was 99% water and perhaps 1% gas. As I mentioned previously, the mechanic who worked on this car whom I will forever refer to as "Short-cut Joe", failed to place the cover over the fuel pump boot leaving it wide open and allowing the tank to fill with several gallons of water over the years. This seems like it should be a fairly straight forward job, but this tank was quite literally full, so it took almost two hours of hanging over the side of the car emptying the fuel tank the old fashioned way.

What I quickly realized is that it takes a lot of these small cans (and five buckets) to empty out a gas tank, and this turns out to be back breaking work because you are hanging over the side of the car in a rather awkward position . I tried crawling in the trunk at one point to see if that was more comfortable but that was completely unworkable; it may have worked if I was a monkey and had longer arms. This might have gone faster if I had a siphon, but ultimately I don't know that a siphon would have worked because there was so much crud in the tank it might have just plugged up the siphon. Notice the piece of wood in the background holding up the trunk lid? I also need to get new lift struts for the entire car.

Take a look at these floaties! This was pretty typical of each can I pulled out, and the closer I got to the bottom of the tank the worse it got. The last bucket that I pulled out contained a fairly thick slurry of brown gunk; the sort of stuff that will clog up a fuel filter in record time. Once it became ineffective to use the can to get the last of the liquid out of the tank I just used an old shop towel to soak up what was left.

This is what the inside of the tank looked like once I had most of the liquid out of the tank. There are pieces of an old clamp in there, and lots of bits of rust which are the remains of the old steel fuel return line and also the remains of the fuel pump boot support bracket. Both of these items literally disintegrated in the tank. As you can see, the bottom of the tank is littered with bits of rust. This is going to take some real work to get cleaned up. Acetone is really good for cleaning up fuel "gunk" but I'm not so sure how good it is as disolving this type of mess. Has anyone tried acetone on this before? There is not a lot of fuel "gunk" in here, there are lots of bits of rust that have sort of welded themselves to the bottom of the tank.

This image shows what is left of the fuel pump support bracket. I am going need to add that to my list for the next parts order. I should have realized that I was not going to find the support bracket in tact, inside of the tank when I pulled the fuel pump boot and saw the ring of rust around the mouth the opening. It is going to take some work to remove the remains of the support bracket, they are almost welded into place with rust. I tried gently prying it away with a flat head screw driver but it just came off in small bits, and I was concerned about damaging the tank using the screw driver and applying too much pressure. I have more work to do here.

I finally dug my hand into the tank and just started pulling random "stuff" out. This was my first of several handfuls of junk that came out of the tank. You can see a bit of the old steel fuel retun line, part of a clamp, and some other random bits. Seriously, how does this much junk get into the tank of a car? If you have a Delorean and have never cleaned the tank, you really need to do this! Even if your car is running well, you never know what is lurking in your tank waiting to cause problems down the road. If you have an original fuel pump boot, those are known to degrade into a black goop that can also cause some serious problems. Clean out your tank, and check out everything in there!

The good news is that the fuel tank baffle and the retainers are still in good shape and I should be able to re-use them.