Going to Drain the gas tank..is there a 'best way'

[glemon]

OK, sounds like you have more problems than just the gas tank, but for the tank, cleaning out the crud in the line probably won't be enough, there is probably almost certainly a lot of rust and scale in the tank, and as you drive around and slosh the gas it will be knocked loose and clog the line again (and again and again, been there).

So you need to either get a new tank, or do what I an others, did, I used to be a believer in seal kits until the last one I tried started flaking off (big chunks clog the system even better than small ones.)

So I got a used tank with some rust and used the method of making sure it was drained completely and throwing in a couple of handfulls of clean gravel/small rocks. Shake the heck out of it, upside down, sideways, etc. every possible way, then shake it some more. If you are averse to or not capable of hard physical labor (I had muscles very sore for a few days after)you may need to figure out a tumbler method of some sort, do a search on youtube of cleaning rusty gas tank, many good ideas. You have to work a little to get the gravel out, I then flushed with water and dried by blowing out with a shop vac with the tube put on the exhaust rather than the suction side.

Here are some sample videos:


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=27hCG2J3nJA

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JvwoG6HOHr4

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ef2zydL3IYI

 

[CJD]

But now it's smells & smokes like burning oil & just overheated : \

It does get better, but only one step at a time.

I hear that is what you get when you put the orange junk in an open system...yuk!

 

[Afrodesia]

Much obliged y'all. So much great advice and instruction.

Now to start a thread about why it overheated and why it's smoking from the engine compartment.
I'm praying it's not 'the big one' = O

 

[Afrodesia]

What in the heck??? It looks like cold buffalo chicken wing grease in there!

Was that yours?

 

[TR3driver]

Yup, that was TS13571L not long after I started working on it. Never did get a good answer as to what or why the yellow crunchy stuff was; but I doubt it had anything to do with Dexcool (the "orange junk") as the car had been in storage since about 1975 and Dexcool wasn't introduced until some 20 years after that. My Dad (a retired chemist) opined that perhaps the glycol had formed some kind of complex with the aluminum from the housing. CLR (the home product sold for removing calcium, lime and rust stains) seemed to dissolve it well enough after I scraped out as much as I could; but I wasn't able to get the temp gauge sender out of it's hole so I just installed the housing from my wrecked TR3A and moved on.

Anyway, my point was just that now you need to look into why the cooling system isn't working. First thing I would do is take the radiator to a radiator shop and insist that they "rod it out". My shop claimed it flowed fine and didn't need to be rodded; but after I tried everything else and took the radiator back for the third time, they tried to rod it and found that the tubes were all coated inside with what they called "mud". After installing a new core (the old one leaked badly once all the mud was gone), all my cooling problems suddenly disappeared.

On the fuel tank, I'll make an alternate suggestion that worked well for me : Leave the tank alone (unless it is leaking), lose the filter under the tank and let the sediment bowl do its job. You may have to clean it kind of frequently at first, but if you use the car regularly, the inside of the tank will eventually finish losing the coat of rust flakes and stabilize on its own.

On my 3A, the bottom of the tank was leaking when I got the car so I had to pull the tank out. I found a small area with a cluster of pin holes, so I soldered a patch over that area (after flushing the tank thoroughly with water to remove all fuel vapors) and put it back in without doing anything else to the inside of the tank. It went some 30 years with no further problems except some sediment in the bowl. This is what the bowl looked like after having been driven for probably 5 years without being cleaned, and sitting for another 5 after the car got wrecked: