Tuesday, 15 August 2023

Charlie's Shed - Lining a petrol tank

Regular readers will know that in the past few months I have made weld repairs to two petrol tanks, one of which still has a weep in a very inaccessible place.

Today I'm going to line the tank with Slosh, from Rustbuster. This is a polyurethane sealer, resistant to Ethanol, that cures in air. I've cleaned this tank already with their SP10 Tank Kleen and a selection of nuts and bolts:



Those bolts came out a lot cleaner than they went in!

The sealer comes in two bottles, for two coats. You have to pour it in, rotate it around, wait twenty minutes and repeat twice more.


You let it drain from the tap connection to avoid it pooling in the bottom of the tank.

The reason you don't want it pooling is that it gases off a little when setting, and you don't want voids in the lining:


Three hours later, or when the sealer is dry but still tacky, you do the second coat in the same way. Then you let it cure for five days. Easy peasy.

This 400 ml kit is supposed to be sufficient for a 10 gallon tank, and I'm sure it is. My plan was to seal both the MZ tank and the Huntmaster tank in one sitting, but obviously two tanks have a greater metal surface than one tank (though the two together totalled less than 10 gallons) and I wasn't confident I'd have enough for both, so I ordered some more sealer for the FH.


Now that son Tom has his MZ sparking, he's clamouring to get his tank back...

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