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Day Four to Ten -- Dealing with the RUSTY TANK and then waiting....

Submitted by shredjesse on Thu, 05/16/2013 - 23:06

First and foremost, I had to get the gas in the tank out. It's surely been there since 2004, gross. I dumped it all out, and the gas was brown and muddy. Not a great sign at all... I then washed the gas tank out lightly with water, and hit the interior as much as I could with an air compressor to blow it out. Next up I hit it with a heat gun for about 20-30 minutes or so to dry it out thoroughly. Lastly, I took a pencil propane torch into the puppy and tried to burn out any remaining gas. There was none to be found it would seem. Success... oh wait...

That tank is RUSTY! I have never seen a tank this rusty with gasoline that gross in there! Half the rust was just a gelatenous glob of old gasoline and surface rust. This tank was going to need some cleaning. I already had the POR-15 gas tank treatment coming, but I knew it was going to take more than a swish with even the heaviest of cleaners. This was going to require some serious prep work!

The first task was to bang loose all the major surface Rust:

Which got a LOT of grossness out, and resulted in a pile of this after just the first cleaning:

I went through two more rounds of this, and finally hit the point where it seemed futile to continue. I washed the tank out with hot water and soap, then rinsed and cleaend with baking soda and vinegear, and drained and rainsed thoroughly and dried again. At this point, all that remained was light surface rust. It was prepped and ready for the POR-15!

Unfortunately, my hands were full during the POR-15 process, but let me tell you that I am SOLD on this stuff! The cleaner went in and removed everything and it was blatantly just metal and rust in the tank after that. From there, the rust remover and surface prep was also amazing. No more rust, no more anything! Just bare metal. I will use POR-15 from here on out! Next up I poured in the treatment, and sloshed it all over the tank. It settled, and thus began the lank wait. The instructions call for 96 hours to cure... that's 4 days! ARGH!