Gas Tank Problem

[Maxxster]

My 96 Maxum 2100SR has been dying in the middle of the lake lately... after about 15 minutes of good going. Marina replaced the fuel filter once and it happened again and now they say the tank is full of gunk that is clogging the fuel filter and carb jets. They say the 15 minutes of wake hitting stirs up the junk and sends it to the carb. They suggest dumping all the gas and cleaning the tank.

Anyone else have this problem? Anyone have a good way to accomplish this without spending big dollars or blowing myself up? Marina says the tank would have to be cut out of the boat in order to remove it.

I have also read about how ethanol enhanced fuel can destroy fiberglass tanks and that it causes them to deteriorate and cause my kind of problem. I have also read that this would only affect boats built before 1984. I have used gas with ethanol in it and am wondering if it has caused my trouble.

Anyone got any suggestions? :?

[seapuppy]

welcome to the zoo...although ethenol can cause problems....it's not been reported in poly tanks..which yours has.....but...you can remove the tank indicator out of the stern of the tank and pump the gas out into a barrel..then it would be alot eaiser to flush it with water and pump that out ....then air drying...but ......you would need to clean the screen at the pickup in the tank.....I don't really see a point in cutting the tank out when access can be had by the tank level inidicator.....check to see if there is room to pull that....should be plenty of access area for the TLI....


SP

[Maxxster]

Thanks for the advice.

Of course I added almost 3/4 of a tank before going out on the lake and now I have a tank nearly full of old and new gas that is gunky.

Any advice on how I might "pump the gas out"? We are talking about gasoline here... and a lot of it. That's what I meant about "blowing myself up".

Once I get the gas out, you think sticking the garden hose in there and running it a while will do the trick? Do I need to do something stronger?

Should I blast it with compressed air afterward to speed the drying?

I assume the screen is attached to the tank pickup and will come out of the tank with the removed pickup right?

[seapuppy]

well...yeah...you could do the fill it with water trick and suck that out a couple of times with a garden hose...getting the gas out is the hard part if you have a 55 gal barrel that can be sealed.....then your gonna have to rig up a filter of some sort and refill the tank with that gas....marina's do it all the time.....

there is a screen at the end of the tank pick up..need to replace that too...


SP

[Gazjen]

I've just done this on mine I pumped the fuel out with a pneumatic pump thats just fed by compressed air and works with two diaphams

Another way of doing it use a vacuum cleaner to provide your suction in to a barrel

At the time I had no pump and someone had put petrol in the works diesel van so I dipped a pipe in the tank one in the barrel then another in the barrel and then to the vacuum hose a long way away (long hose required) the vacuum provides the vacuum in the barrel which pulls it out the tank.

Not sure how safe it is but i'm still here the best bet is the pneumatic pump or something like this

http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/DELUXE-SYPHON-...QQcmdZViewItem

Oh yea I pumped my fuel through a another filter in to a couple of cars