THE FUEL TANK - How To Remove, Restore And Refit The Fuel Tank

As with all these guides I am trying to help everyone from the complete novice who has never touched a spanner before to the more experienced  who just need to check a few things on this particular bike before starting on their own.
I will try to show every step no matter how basic they may seem and depending on your experience just pick out the bits you need, its best to show to much information rather than not enough.

Anyway this is how I did It

Remove the seat and side panels first, then you can begin to remove the tank.


All that actually holds the tank to the bike are two bolts located at the back of the tank.

Remove the two bolts at the rear of the tank

Under the right hand side of the tank is the fuel sender unit and two breather pipes, one from the fuel sender cover and one from the rear of the tank, these run under the tank, between the frame rails and end up down by the swingarm. I left these attached to the tank when I removed it but just take note of where they are routed ready for when you re-assemble the bike.

Breather pipe from fuel guage sender unit runs under the tank

Between frame rails

On this bike they were cable tied to the rear brake master cylinder

And then down through a metal loop on the swing arm

Dont forget to unplug the fuel sender wire, Just pull the connector block apart

Under the left hand side of the tank remove the two pipes connected to the fuel tap / petcock

Pull the main fuel line off the right of the fuel petcock

And the vacuum pipe from the rear 

And thats it, you can now lift the rear of the tank and slide the whole tank backwards and upwards toward the rear of the bike

The underside of the tank

The fuel tap showing the two pipe connectors, the larger one on the right is the main fuel line to the carbs
and the smaller on at the rear of the tap is the vacuum pipe connector

This picture shows the fuel sender cover with the breather pipe attached,
the fuel gauge sender wire and connector block
and the other breather pipe located  at the rear of the tank

And that's it, my next post is going to show the removal of all the ancillary parts such as the fuel tap, 

fuel level sender unit and fuel cap. 

Then I will attempt to remove the rust from the inside of the tank before preparing it ready for paint.

The tank is extremely rusty inside and normally I would scrap a tank as bad as this

but the whole point of this blog is to restore as much as possible for free or

at least for as little as possible so I will try something a little different on this one and see how

we get on.

Watch the video here