With the LUV fuel tank in place and ready to be secured after drilling holes through the frame rails, there were a couple little things I had to address before fully securing the tank. One, since the tank would literally be metal on metal, I decided to provide some form of cushioning, in the form of old heater hose. I did this by cutting a couple short lengths of hose lengthwise, slid the sections of hose over the frame rails, covering the drilled holes, then drilled holes through one side of the hose. Once the hoses were prepared, I set the fuel tank down on top of the hoses, and over the frame rails. I used some 2" long 5/16" bolts with washers to go through the top of the fuel tank and the amount of spacing between it, the hose, frame rail and the outside washer, securing everything with a nut. With the fuel tank fully secured, I moved on to another small issue, the fuel pickup unit. With the fuel tank in the orientation it's currently in on Truckstang, the nipples on the pickup were pointed to the rear. I had to remove the pickup unit and test the changing of the orientation to see how I could get the nipples to face forward. I ended up having to carefully twist the pickup screen slightly, in order to allow pickup to sit in the new orientation and not hit the bottom of the fuel tank. In the new orientation, if I left the pickup screen in the same position, it would've hit the bottom of the tank as it curves upward. Twisting the pickup screen allowed me to orient the unit in the direction I needed, but there was another unfortunate issue that I had to accept. The bolt pattern only allowed me to install three out of five of the retaining screws to hold the unit in place. I even tried to widen the holes to see if I could expose the off-center holes to no avail. I installed the three screws, verifying there was no play in the pickup unit. Worst case, I'll have to apply a thin layer of gasket maker to the rubber bushing to further seal the unit if it proves to leak during use. The last part of this part of the fuel system that I had to deal with, still, is the fuel filler tube. Even though I had made some modifications to get the tube as close as possible to the filler neck on the fuel tank, there were still a couple issues I'd be facing. One is the idea that the rubber hose I would need is either the largest radiator hose that I could source, or the actual rubber tube that couples the stock filler tube to the stock fuel tank. The sharp angle that would need to be covered is not achievable with the stock rubber hose. I came to the conclusion that I would have to chop the filler tube down at an angle, and weld an angled piece of exhaust pipe to the remaining filler tube, placing that exhaust pipe at a position where its almost straight in line with the filler neck on the fuel tank. Also, the exhaust pipe is a narrower diameter in order to accommodate normal sized rad hose. After I weld this together I'll more than likely have to hit the junkyard to source a length of rad hose that will fit our application. In the original configuration, the only large diameter rad hose I felt I could find would probably be for some large engine like a diesel bus or industrial truck with a huge cooling system. This way, with the new configuration, I should be able to use a rad hose from a regular full size truck to couple the filler tube ends. After all, this thing is only allowing fuel under no pressure to transition from a filler through to the fuel tank without leaking all over the interior of the trunk. After this is done, I just need to install a short length of fuel line to couple the end of the metal fuel line with the nipple on the pickup unit. Save for the sending unit, I can then move forward to the engine bay and get the carb installed.
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