- Hey, this is Davin with Hagerty
and our Redline rebuild update.
Relative to our 1950 Chevy pickup truck,
we are onto the gas tank and the heater core today.
So, what we're gonna do is, well,
there's a lot of rust inside of this gas tank.
Now, outside it's in pretty decent shape.
I don't believe there's any holes in it,
so all I'm gonna do is I'm gonna take the sending unit out
so I can get a little better look at it,
and give you a little better look at what's inside.
Then I may use some milkstone and some rocks
and basically slosh it around,
let it soak for a day,
and then drain it all out,
and see what the inside of this looks like.
Now, these tanks are certainly available
through most of the auto parts stores.
I'm sure LMC has these as well,
but quite frankly, if I can reuse this,
I'm gonna reuse it.
I've done the same thing with the heater core, actually.
It's over here,
and as ugly as this may look,
I have pressure-tested this.
I have soaked a little Lime-A-Way in it
and have it fairly clean.
You can hear there is something in it,
but it's not gonna hurt anything as far as I'm concerned.
And I cannot buy this heater core.
At least, I have not found anyone
that has these heater cores,
so I'm going to get this put back in
and also test the blower motor.
Now, granted, for this truck,
does it make a big difference if we have a lot of heat?
No, absolutely not.
We're gonna be driving it during the summer,
all those types of things,
but there are some days in the early mornings
and the evenings that get a little chilly,
and it's always a good idea to have at least a defroster
as far as blowing some amount of air across your windshield
to keep that clean.
I found that's more useful than physical heat,
but this is part of that circuit.
So, that, I'm gonna see if I can get the sending unit out.
I'm not holding a whole lot of confidence
in that these screws are gonna hold up
as far as I'm probably gonna have to put some heat to them.
Now this fuel tank has not seen fuel in many, many years,
and has no even smell of rotten gasoline in it.
So, I'm not concerned about heating this.
If this was anything different than that,
I would not recommend putting any heat to a fuel tank.
(scraping) (upbeat rock music)
All right, so here's our plan of attack on this tank.
We have the sending unit off.
We broke about three out of five of 'em off,
as far as the screws are concerned.
Before I get into repairing those,
we went through and kind of inspected the tank.
Yes, there's rust inside of it.
There are no visible holes outwardly.
This is the absolute worst,
as far as the outside is concerned,
and what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna soak it
with some milkstone and some rocks, basically,
to help break up as I roll it around.
We'll loosen it up with a milk stone
and then use rocks in the tank.
Kind of shuffle it around,
and that'll break up the bigger pieces,
and we're gonna see how well it cleans up.
Now, if it doesn't clean up well enough
to where it doesn't hold gasoline,
I will get a new tank.
But quite honestly, for the $10 worth of milk stone,
and letting it just sit all by itself
and do its own thing,
if I can save the tank, I save the tank.
One less thing to have to buy.
Uh-oh.
I don't remember dripping there, do you?
All right, well, hey.
I am an eternal optimist.
And then sometimes you get beat.
So, here's where we're at.
We have a minor pinhole in this fuel tank,
and you can see it dripping,
and we just put a little bit of the milkstone,
well, I put a gallon worth of milkstone in it,
and it found the hole.
So, hey.
At least we didn't spend a whole lot more time on this,
so guess I'll be ordering a new one.
All right, hey, we're back here with our gas tank,
and I am going to have to salvage this.
Our tank has a hole in it.
I need to salvage this little fitting off the bottom,
but the best part is is we have a fresh new tank,
and it's gonna cure our leaking woes.
Look at that beauty.
But since I want to be able to take fuel out of it,
I'll have to replace that little neckpiece,
but it's got a fresh neck up here.
It's got our sending unit.
Even came with, actually,
it came with fresh screws and gaskets,
so, beautiful.
All right.
So, I need to get this dressed up.
Get that one the rest of the way stripped apart.
And then we could put the new one into the pickup truck.
Oohwah.
'Kay, so, here's our sending unit out of our fuel tank,
and as I mentioned, it's froze up here,
and what I want to do, though,
is I want to take and pull this apart.
I want to see how bad the inside of this is
before I spend too much time and effort
trying to get this working
if there's something that's detrimentally broke.
But there's three rivets here.
Take and pop that apart.
It should slide apart after that.
We'll see.
But here's how this is supposed to function.
I've soaked it and heated it, actually, a little bit,
and got everything broke loose,
so now it moves nice and freely.
So now as your fuel tank rises in level,
then your float, of course, floats and rises,
and it rotates the arm up top, okay?
And you'll see on here on this little arm,
there's a little pickup point.
That hits into this,
basically, a long resistor.
A contact resistor.
So, this is power in,
the case is ground,
and as this rotates through,
the distance from the positive
to where this pickup point is at changes,
and as that changes, the resistance changes.
So, say the longer the distance it is here,
then the more resistance you have, and then likewise.
Now, let's check it and verify
before we put it all back together.
Obviously, I need to clean all this area up
and seal it in some fashion,
which I think probably some RTV will be sufficient.
So, I see the cap was on like this,
and this was riveted together with some brass rivets.
Those brass rivets were not doing anything more
than basically an assembly function relative to,
this is in a subassembly.
So, if you think of it from a manufacturing standpoint,
you wouldn't want to have this cap just bouncing around
and damaging that little arm.
So, they riveted it together,
but had rivets such that screws would go through there.
For our purposes, going back together,
I'm not gonna bounce this around the assembly line.
I'm gonna hand-carry it over and stick it in the tank,
so we'll be fine without those rivets
as long as we provide a good,
solid connection between ground-wise.
So, using a multimeter set on ohms,
negative will be on the case,
positive on the line going in,
and right now I have basically,
it's fluctuating a little bit, but...
Basically have zero, well, one.
1-1/2 ohms.
Now, as I lift the float,
you can see it's changing,
so now I'm at 1-8.
So, basically, when I'm all the way down,
you can see there's a dead spot right in here.
So, here's my 1.8, now I'm up 3.6,
four-point, so on and so forth.
And now when I get all the way up to the top,
I am at about 27, 25, 27 ohms.
So, that change in resistance is what drives the gauge
to read empty to full.
So, I'm confident, at least, in putting this back in.
I've also testing the float in some water.
It does float.
It doesn't have a hole in it,
or doesn't appear to have a hole in it at this point.
So, I'm gonna finish getting this cleaned up,
this cap and all this cleaned up a little better.
Again, reattach everything,
and I think, actually,
what I'm gonna do is just put some dielectric grease in here
so I know I have a good solid contact
between here and here.
It doesn't really need to seal, environment-wise,
so that's how I'm gonna tackle this.
Get it put into the brand-new fuel tank.
I also have these little stub
that comes out of the bottom of the tank.
I will clean this up just on a wire brush,
get rid of my marks that I used to get it out with,
and put some Teflon around the brass going into the tank,
and of course, when I put the fitting on,
I'll do the same thing down here.
And then, at that point,
we can put some rubber strapping underneath
the bottom of the tank,
so where the tank sits into the truck,
basically, they call it the cradle or the mount.
There's some rubber,
or it really looks like roofing felt paper, originally,
but I'm just gonna use some rubber
I got at the hardware store, lay it in there.
It's so it doesn't rub a hole in the tank
between the metal mount and the metal tank.
And we'll put that in there, put the straps back on,
and the tank will be fresh, of course.
With some rubber lines going up
so you can fill it from the outside,
and that'll wrap up our tank project.
So, here we go.
We'll get that done.
(upbeat rock music)
Fuel tank is installed.
We're able to reuse the old straps.
I put a little bit of rubber here as well as down here
to help protect the tank from the metal rubbing through.
The original fuel sender is put back in.
Nice rubber gasket in there.
Everything was working fine.
I need to run that line from underneath up to the sender.
I'll get that done here in a little bit,
and then, of course, the vent tube,
and then the filler tube,
have brand-new rubber lines to them
as far as the coupler's concerned.
And at this point, we're ready to move to the bottom side,
put the pepcock on the bottom of the fuel tank,
and then run the fuel line up to where the engine will be.
But this side (pounds) is done.
(upbeat rock music)
All right, so, I have the fuel tank in.
Our fuel line is run.
The drain and the union, if you will,
is done on the bottom of the tank,
so that's all buttoned up all the way out to here.
This will go directly to the fuel pump
once the engine's put back in place.
I also ran the sending line for the fuel tank gauge
from the harness onto the top of there.
I have to put one little ground loop on.
That's all that's left there.
So, the fuel lines and system
are all buttoned up from that aspect.
Now I'm gonna get after the heater core,
putting all that back together.
This is the heater box here in two pieces,
and just going to basically put it all back together.
I'm gonna get that started today,
but it is towards the end of the day,
so I'm not gonna get this finished today,
but I'm gonna start working after it.
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and hey, keep tuning in,
'cause we're gonna have a whole lot more of this,
and if nothing else, this truck still isn't done,
but we're getting closer.
(upbeat rock music)
(heater humming) (upbeat rock music)