Fuel Gone Bad - Why You Should Drain The Fuel From Your Gas Tank

Why you should drain the fuel from your gas tank

Many people will tell you that if you are going to store your bike for any length of time you must drain the fuel from the tank and carbs as it will go off.

What does go off mean and is it as serious as people say it is ?

It is as bad as people say it is !!!

As you know I am stripping my old Kawasaki Zephyr ZR750 with the intention of rebuilding it by saving as many parts as I can from the old bike using various weird and wonderful ideas I have seen on the net.

The idea is to spend as little as possible and use some unusual ideas to save and restore the original parts where possible.

One part I want to save is the fuel tank, once in very good condition and now very rusty inside.

The rust could have been prevented if the tank had been drained before storing and saved me a lot of work now but you live and learn so check out my video above to see what came out of the tank !

Fuel tank removal page now complete

Just finished the page showing step by step removal of the fuel tank so I suppose the next page is going to be the stripping of the ancillaries from the tank and de-rusting ready for paint.

Dodgy Fuel Tank And Not Giving In

Now the whole point of doing this rebuild is that I want to spend as little as possible doing it. Anyone can build anything they want if they throw enough money at it ( or throw enough money at someone else to build it for them !).

Ideally I would be able to do everything without spending any money at all but I know that for safety reasons or just common sense I will have to spend some money but I intended to use my own and hopefully your ingenuity and skills to reuse and repair the existing bike parts as much as possible.

This all sounded like a good idea at the time but one of the first things to come off the bike was the tank.
it looked ok from the outside, a little surface rust but not to bad.

Then I decided to open the fuel cap and look inside.

Two hours and much swearing later the fuel cap eventually came of, it had rusted itself shut and the inside of the tank is completely rusty and full of water.

Pretty nasty rust inside the tank
At least it does not leak

Now normally I would just scrap it and buy a new one but that's not the point of this project so I need to try and salvage this one and this is unfamiliar territory for me.
Cutting and reshaping, painting and stuff like that is no problem with the correct tools and equipment but rust well
I JUST DONT DO RUST.

I could cheat and buy a new one and just say it was fine all along but I am doing this as a challenge to myself and will be honest all the way through and anyway I do not give in that easily

So even this early in the project I am looking for ideas on how to de-rust and restore the inside of the fuel tank preferably for free or at least at very little cost and everything needs to be able to be done at home without specialist tools.

I will let you know what I decide to do and how it turns out in later posts but if any one has any ideas please let me know and I will chose one to try.

What have I done ........

Getting Motivated

Today I came home from work and took a look at the bike sitting outside in the sunshine.

I thought "bloody hell what am I going to do?"

Technically this bike is barely suitable for spares and I would not even entertain attempting to touch it under normal circumstances as it is not worth anything now and it wont be worth much even if I do get it looking good because its not exactly a sought after classic.

But then that is not the point, The point of this exercise is to see what I can do with no money and basic equipment to save this bike from the scrap yard.

It would be fairly easy to do something with it if I was prepared to take it to the workshop and throw some money at it as I normally would but this is going to be my challenge to myself, my attempt to do something the hard way, something to make me think !

So I will get on with the strip down and post my thoughts and progress as often as possible.

My Youtube Chanel

Well I decided to set up a youtube channel and add videos of the project so not only can check out the photos on this blog but I will add links to the videos as well. Hopefully you will enjoy the videos too.

This is the first one I have added to youtube as an experiment more than anything else and it just shows a walk-around of the bike as it was when I started, ( I have never posted a video before so this was really just to test how it works ).

Well here it is

Like I said this one is just a walk-around of the bike and if you have any suggestions for improving my videos please comment and let me know.