I noticed rust spots in my gas tank while filling it last year. I had always tried to keep the tank full and used fuel stabilizer while it was setting over the winter. Even so, I developed rust spots all over the visible interior of the tank. So, I had planned to coat the inside this winter. My son did his leaking tank some years ago, so I wasn’t in any hurry to get started, seeing what he went through..
A few days ago I looked at it very closely with a good light and saw good amount of rust inside. Time to fix it. I purchased the Kreem Tank Liner kit from JC Whitney. It was the least expensive place I could find that carried it. They don’t list it as Kreem in the catalog, but that’s what you receive, the name brand product.
Coating Your Gas Tank Interior:
The kit is a 3 solution (bottles) program. Before you start, first degrease the tank with your own diswashing soap. I used regular liquid dish soap, then did it again with Simple Green. You would be amazed at the amount of rust and crap I got out of the tank just by doing this.
This is a good time to drill out the breather hole in the tank neck. With all the gas fumes gone, I increased that little hole to almost ¼ inch and added another one, opposite, on the other side. This was discussed here many times.
Now the hard part is to seal up the tank for the acid bath. These chemicals are NOT paint friendly and you have to be extremely careful using them. You cannot pour them in and out without getting some on the tank. The tank has to be covered with plastic & plastic tape to prevent contact. The pickup tube hole is easily plugged by taking a small piece of metal and drilling a couple of holes to line up with the ones in the tank. A rubber gasket under the metal plate does the trick. The hard one is the tank filler hole. I tried a few different methods with not great results. I even used an automotive expansion plug in the hole. Everything leaked. Finally, I took a double layer of heavy plastic bag and pushed in into the hole. Then I forced the gas cap in while holding the key open and slid it into position, released the key and wiggled the cap it to set the locking prongs. That worked.
I was ready to start the kit. The first part is an acid bath that I kept in for about 24 hours with agitation every once in a while. Tilting it this way and that got the solution to all interior parts. There was still rust in the filler hole area, so I used an old toothbrush to get that clean. Dumping this out revealed a lot more gunk. This stuff must have grown in there because I was very careful with what went into that tank. A good rinsing out and draining was next. There was still a lot of water sloshing around in the tank even after through draining from both holes. I used an aspirator and some oxygen tubing to suck the rest of the water out.
The next bottle is a conditioner/water remover. This was sloshed all around the tank to absorb the excess water and coat it with solvent to receive the tank coating. A couple of minutes of this and it was dumped and aspirated out.
Finally, the white paint like, Kreem coating was dumped in the tank, and the tank sealed. The tank was rolled every direction possible to get this stuff all over in insides. The tank was opened up and aired per the instructions and then re-agitated for another coat. The Kreem was dumped back into it’s original container (about half came out). There was still some liquid inside and the tank was rolled around every hour and placed in a different position so the coating wouldn’t puddle in one place. After a day of drying, this process of coating the tank with the white liquid was done a second time. After a good drying, the holes can be cleaned out and the petcock reinstalled. I have a nice clean white interior now.
These tanks are bare metal. The only manufactures that coat their tanks are Harley and BMW. Go figure.
Chuck C.
Chuck was A Member Of The Cafe
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"VS" Intruders & "S" series Boulevards
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