Well, I finally got the fuel feed blues ironed out in this wagon.
Tank's right easy to remove and replace if - A: it's not full of gas & B: you've replaced the rusty, 47-year-old hardware that holds the tank in place.[}]
I first blew out the fuel line from front to rear. There was nothing to clog it.
Hmmmmmm..... OK, down with the damned tank again. And I was dreading this because I'd topped up the gas after I'd gotten it running earlier in the week.
So I rounded up all available gas containers and got the long piece of fuel hose I'd used as a makeshift gas line to get me home the other day. NOT wanting to give myself chemical pneumonia, I rounded up my little MightVac, hand vacuum pump - a neat and versatile tool I'd only recently acquired. I then fed the piece of 5/16ths gas hose down the filler neck so I could hook my MightVac to it and start siphoning the gas out of the tank.... What the??? The stupid hose wouldn't go but about a foot into the filler neck. After a few trys, I got a flashlight and looked into the pipe. Dang! It had one of those old anti-siphon spring thingys installed in the filler neck!
After looking around the shop a bit, I found a piece of stiff aluminum wire, bent a hook in the end and used it to snag that spring and pull it to the top of the filler pipe. Once there, I spiraled the spring out of the pipe and proceeded to slide the rubber gas line in as I had originally intended. A few strokes of the vacuum pump and the gas was flowing out. I managed to siphon all but about 2 gallons out and I proceeded to drop the tank using a floor jack and a piece of 2X4. I poured the remaining fuel out and spied inside....
Sure enough - the pick-up tube was crammed with what looked like varnish from evaporated gasoline. Well - DUH! Actualy, in inspecting the tank the first time I had it down, this stuff eluded me. The way the tank's constructed, you really can't get a GOOD view of all it's interior.
This time, one I'd emptied all the fuel out, I let the tank dry out for a day and then blew inside it - 30 ways from Sunday with my air nozzle. After doing that and beating on the tank with a stick to vibrate all the loose crud to the back end of the tank (tank standing on it's back end), I vacuumed all the loose stuff out using a makeshift vacuum tool made from a piece of PVC pipe.[
)]Then after scrutinizing the interior with a powerful flashlight, I deemed it ready to reistall - again.
(one word of caution here - DO NOT use a vacuum cleaner on a tank that's not set and TOTALLY dried out and been blown out as well. Not unless you wanna see your shop vac go into "afterburner"! Such has NOT happened to me but I've heard that it has happened. And I've also witnessed "Clean" gas tanks explode because the folks working on them just took the potential of a tank full of fumes too casually!)
Anyway, as I said earlier, R&R's easier with nice, clean nuts & bolts. But I guess I wasn't holding my mouth just right as the one mount bolt under the filler neck was a real pain in the posterior about taking on it's nut. This would've been fairly easy if there hadn't been a big, new tailpipe right below it!
Finally, frustrated, I decided to try removing the rearmost pipe hanger so I could push the pipe aside a bit. The muffler shop had made an L-shaped bracket to effect a rear hanger in the course of putting the new exhaust system on the Stude. They did a pretty good job, all in all. But why they chose a new spot to anchor the rearmost hangers instead of using the factory spot, I can't say.
So as I started to loosen this new hanger, it struck me that the rear wiring harness wasn't willing to move out of the way. This pipe hanger bracket being bolted to the top of the cross-member, I couldn't actualy see the bolt head or the harness where it crosses the cross-member. It was tough to get to the nut because the pipe was in the way of it too. But once removed, the harness was freed and it was readily appearant that the guy putting on the hanger had securely clamped the harness down with the
Tank's right easy to remove and replace if - A: it's not full of gas & B: you've replaced the rusty, 47-year-old hardware that holds the tank in place.[}]I first blew out the fuel line from front to rear. There was nothing to clog it.
Hmmmmmm..... OK, down with the damned tank again. And I was dreading this because I'd topped up the gas after I'd gotten it running earlier in the week.So I rounded up all available gas containers and got the long piece of fuel hose I'd used as a makeshift gas line to get me home the other day. NOT wanting to give myself chemical pneumonia, I rounded up my little MightVac, hand vacuum pump - a neat and versatile tool I'd only recently acquired. I then fed the piece of 5/16ths gas hose down the filler neck so I could hook my MightVac to it and start siphoning the gas out of the tank.... What the??? The stupid hose wouldn't go but about a foot into the filler neck. After a few trys, I got a flashlight and looked into the pipe. Dang! It had one of those old anti-siphon spring thingys installed in the filler neck!
After looking around the shop a bit, I found a piece of stiff aluminum wire, bent a hook in the end and used it to snag that spring and pull it to the top of the filler pipe. Once there, I spiraled the spring out of the pipe and proceeded to slide the rubber gas line in as I had originally intended. A few strokes of the vacuum pump and the gas was flowing out. I managed to siphon all but about 2 gallons out and I proceeded to drop the tank using a floor jack and a piece of 2X4. I poured the remaining fuel out and spied inside....
Sure enough - the pick-up tube was crammed with what looked like varnish from evaporated gasoline. Well - DUH! Actualy, in inspecting the tank the first time I had it down, this stuff eluded me. The way the tank's constructed, you really can't get a GOOD view of all it's interior.
This time, one I'd emptied all the fuel out, I let the tank dry out for a day and then blew inside it - 30 ways from Sunday with my air nozzle. After doing that and beating on the tank with a stick to vibrate all the loose crud to the back end of the tank (tank standing on it's back end), I vacuumed all the loose stuff out using a makeshift vacuum tool made from a piece of PVC pipe.[
)]Then after scrutinizing the interior with a powerful flashlight, I deemed it ready to reistall - again. (one word of caution here - DO NOT use a vacuum cleaner on a tank that's not set and TOTALLY dried out and been blown out as well. Not unless you wanna see your shop vac go into "afterburner"! Such has NOT happened to me but I've heard that it has happened. And I've also witnessed "Clean" gas tanks explode because the folks working on them just took the potential of a tank full of fumes too casually!)
Anyway, as I said earlier, R&R's easier with nice, clean nuts & bolts. But I guess I wasn't holding my mouth just right as the one mount bolt under the filler neck was a real pain in the posterior about taking on it's nut. This would've been fairly easy if there hadn't been a big, new tailpipe right below it!
Finally, frustrated, I decided to try removing the rearmost pipe hanger so I could push the pipe aside a bit. The muffler shop had made an L-shaped bracket to effect a rear hanger in the course of putting the new exhaust system on the Stude. They did a pretty good job, all in all. But why they chose a new spot to anchor the rearmost hangers instead of using the factory spot, I can't say.
So as I started to loosen this new hanger, it struck me that the rear wiring harness wasn't willing to move out of the way. This pipe hanger bracket being bolted to the top of the cross-member, I couldn't actualy see the bolt head or the harness where it crosses the cross-member. It was tough to get to the nut because the pipe was in the way of it too.
But once removed, the harness was freed and it was readily appearant that the guy putting on the hanger had securely clamped the harness down with the
[8D][:I][
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We've got to quit saying, 
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