Fuel Tank Removal

From Lee Anderson, Jack Robert 37VT17

Trevor Croteau [owner of Hjortie 37VT33] and I were able to get 4 of the 6 tanks out on Sunday.  Forward port tank could not be removed.  It jammed between the floor joist and the support plate for the shaft seal, the same problem others have had.  I did not have a jack handy so we called it quits for the day.  We loaded up the four tanks we did have (all the SB side and the middle tank on the port side) into my trailer and I took them up to Gas Tank Renu today.  Great bunch of people.  

Joe [from Gas Tank Renu] unloaded the tanks.  He was a bit concerned with all the fiberglass on the tanks.  I said the fiberglass was the boat yard’s attempt to prevent the tanks from rusting and it had worked well enough for 32 years.  He went after the forward SB tank with a scraper and peeled a sizable chunk of the fiberglass off the tank exposing the steel tank surface.  It had visible standing water and rust around the inspection port.  He believed he could clean all the fiberglass off but wanted to do more to see how much of a job it was going to be before he gave me a quote.  He showed me a tank he had just completed the complete Renu process on and it looked brand new.  

They do all the tank refurbishing for the Minnesota DOT.  We agreed on doing the same outside finishing process on our tanks.  Joe said we could put whatever other finish we would like to put over their outside finish if we wanted to, it should be no problem.

Here are some pictures of the tanks. We are at about 8 hours total into the project at this point.