Just a little bit of griping. I took the gas tank out of my Midget last week
and took it with me to my mom and dad's place to do a little clean up on it.
If you saw a green and woodgrain Caravan on I-81 in VA with a gas tank on
top it was me. My wife was kind of embarrassed by that - don't know why.
Anyway, the tank had quite a bit of rusty sludge in it, but no problem areas
or soft spots, so I bought the Eastwood tank cleaner and liner kit to treat
it. Kind of a pain, don't think I'll do it again, but that much turned out
OK. I also cleaned the outside down to bare metal and painted it with
Eastwood's "Tank Tone". I knew it was the wrong color - zinc rather than
black - but that didn't bother me. Anyway put it all back in the car today
and at first everything seemed fine. But there are these two little
Vietnamese girls (about 6 and 9 YO, I guess) who live in the same group of
townhouses as I do and they like to hang around me when I'm working on the
car and ask a MILLION questions (mostly "Why is it so small?"). Anyway I was
sitting in it checking the gas gauge (which is FINALLY working) and the
younger one was sitting in the passenger seat bombarding me with questions,
and the older one kept saying "It really stinks!" I thought is was me since
I had managed to spill gas on myself. But I walked around and sure enough,
there was a STRONG gas smell. Looked underneath and gas was dripping all
over off the bottom of the tank! Turned out I didn't have the pickup line
tight enough - simple fix. But when I wiped the gas off the tank it took
every bit of the paint off! I had let it dry 24 hours, so it should have
been set OK. What kind of frickin' paint is sold to go on a gas tank that
strips so easily with gas?!?! Grrrr. Don't want to take it back out, at
least not now, so I guess I'll just spray it again to try and keep the tank
from rusting until I can do something more permanent.
But at least the new fuel level sender is working nicely. The old one was
stuck solid.
I also cut and welded up what is going to be my new dash using dad's MIG. I
wanted to take pics of the process, but didn't get to. I'll make some pics
of the state of things so far, though, and post a web page about it.
Basically I've taken a padded dash, stripped it, cut out about 9" in the
middle and widened the instrument area by the same amount. So I now have a
big blank area to the right of where the alternator/high beam indicators are
(or were) - vaguely similar to the layout of the later style metal dash
(non-Bugeye). I'm going to cover it with some engine turned stainless steel
that I made up, and the exposed areas will be wrinkle painted. Still have to
figure out what to do along the top edge - need to make some kind of pad or
perhaps a nice wooden strip to complement the steering wheel and shift knob.
Eddie
1971 Midget
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