The fuel tank leak is now top of the list for fixing and we've been running the fuel level down to almost nothing to make dropping the tank a bit easier. With all the required spare parts delivered the stage was set, then this arrived:
The view from the kitchen window suggested that this was NOT the time to be taking Elly off the road! Given that the only reason we bought a Landrover in the first place was to cope a little better with the Highland Winter snow, it seemed a bad idea to be without one now it was back.
The weather improved a bit towards the end of the week so, with a lot of care and help from Ian Watt's guys, we took the tank out...
It was almost empty and actually nowhere near as heavy as I was expecting it to be. With hindsight I could've got it out myself easily enough but the reason I didn't try was 1. the lack of decent access underneath and 2. if it had turned out to be too heavy for me to handle alone, I'd have been in a bit of a jam. I didn't fancy being trapped underneath it, trying to stop it ripping free and yelling for help that wasn't going to arrive....the garage is quite a way from the kitchen!
So, it went to the garage - and a proper ramp - to be removed. The jetwashing I'd given it to get the crud off before we took it out has succeeded in removing most of the original paint. The bare metal doesn't seem to have had any primer on it, so no surprise that it just washed off in sheets. What was a surprise was how clean the steel was underneath. In fact, not a spot of rust at all - it looked, once I'd cleaned off the rest of the old paint, like polished aluminium and probably weighed about the same, too.
The old fuel return pipe was leaking from 2 places - around the seal...
...where 2 of the fixing screws had been stripped and were basically just resting in the holes. I fitted a new seal and pipe. The old pipe was probably OK but as we were there it made no sense to refit the old one.
The vent pipe - if that what it was for - is redundant and had been "closed" with another of PITA's bodges - see the post from last summer - so we replaced our "field fix" with the proper seals.
A coat of cold galvanising primer finished the prep...
and the last job was to refit the fuel sender unit. Now, a confession...I hadn't really inspected this bit of the pipework too closely. I thought I'd found all the bodges when we removed this masterpiece of engineering from the bottom of the tank:
It's fuzzy because I was laughing too much. All the fuel hoses turned out, once we'd got them off the fittings, to be too small for the pipes that they were meant to fit. Unfortunately I hadn't noticed that the correct nuts, back nuts and olive had been removed from the sender unit and a bit of rubber pipe substituted, clamped on with a Jubilee clip. This clip was rusted solid and the attempts to free it saw the IW fitters break the pipe on the sender. With hindsight, we should've just cut the hose away. It being Friday afternoon, there was no way we were going to get a replacement sender much before the middle of the following week, so I decided to try to fix the broken one.
 |
| The remains of the broken plastic pipe can be prised out of the connector |
I drilled out the old fitting with an 8mm bit having pulled out the pickup pipe. This pipe has a tiny O-ring on it, so I was able to push the pipe through the new hole and it still sealed fairly well. With enough pipe sticking through to fix the fuel hose onto, I filled the fitting with JB Weld.
 |
| The pickup pipe pushed through the internal sleeve and bonded in place |
Putting it all back together was easy enough having given the tank a coat of black paint and some underbody sealant on the vulnerable front face. Now we come to the reason for all this work....
 |
| The serial number on the hose gives away its proper use. |
This is a 120mm length of Camping Gaz hose. It happens to be almost the correct internal diameter to fit onto the fuel return pipe on the top of the tank, which is presumably why PITA chose to use it instead of spending about 5 pence on a length of the correct fuel hose. The little Jubilee clip wasn't done up tightly enough to crush the hose - a bit too big (unlike all the other bloody hoses we've changed which were too small) - onto the pipe. The hose was so loose it just pulled off. Added to that the material it was made from isn't designed to carry diesel fuel so has gone harder than bone. Not only did the whole setup leak whenever the long-range tank had fuel in it, the drips blew back along the tank to the back, collecting dirt as they went and plastering the bottom of the tank with filthy, smelly crud. After a while the whole back end stank of fuel. The leak only stopped when the level of fuel in the LR tank dropped to zero since it was now below the level of the return pipe. 3 days and a lot of effort and money to repair this silly bodge......
The "new" tank has had all the areas that are likely to leak or need monitoring moved to more accessible positions, so any future work hopefully can be done without having to dismantle half the back end of the vehicle. Another lesson learned.
No comments:
Post a Comment