Fuel Tanks

Short of removing the tanks, does anyone know of an effective method to "clean" the fuel tanks? On a 38 Californian sedan.* 3208 cats.

Seabuilt - Access Plate Systems*You could give this a look.

A*little less work than taking to old ones out.

The problem is access. You petty much have to get inside them to clean them. Most gunk settles to the bottom.

SD

We*had a 40' GB that had the tanks replaced years ago and was in need of cleaning. The PO had the old tanks replaced with two aluminum tanks, stacked, both port and stb'd. This application made it impossible (due to cost) to clean the upper tanks so we opted to clean only the lower two tanks. This required cutting, drilling, tapping hole, fabricationing plates & gaskets. Tanks were approximately four feet long so two holes were cut in to each tank, one forward, on aft*so our cleaning process could take place. Getting to the tanks in this vessle was pretty straight forward, most of the time we have to have a shipwright come in*to make access for us to get to the top of the tanks.

Guess it depends on whether you have access to the top of the tanks in the Cal.* I do, so I put access ports into each of my three fuel tanks.

I then built a fuel transfer pump with an old quarter hp electric motor, gear pump, and Dahl 200 fuel filter.* This lets me drain the fuel from any tank into the others so that I can see the bottom of the tank.

The two original tanks (40 years old) had black stuff*covering less than half of*the bottom & lower sides.* It took scotchbrite to dislodge it.

Looking at the stuff, I couldn't see any good reason to worry about it.* There didn't seem to be any way that it was about to slough off into the fuel in any circumstance.

To thoroughly clean the tank, there has to be an access port in each baffled section.* I put in one port per tank for inspection purporses, and didn't go any farther after seeing what little was in there.

One other item of interest (???)... I've been terrible about keeping the tanks full over the winter.* In spite of all of the condensation warnings about doing so, I found no more than a couple of drops of water in each tank (and the ports were in the lowest side of each tank).

Met a fellow on the Loop that simply emptied the tanks and used Jepp cleaner (from Home Depot) and water.

Sitting a couple of days rocking the boat and pumped dry solved his problem.

He used a shop vac to remove , and rinsed 2x. The last step was to blow into the tank with the vac to evaporate any last water.

Might work if you have the tank top access.