This was another ugly job! We still had almost 80 gallons of 4 year old fuel in the tanks and didn’t want to burn it in a very expensive engine re-power. This meant the old fuel system above and tank inspection plates needed to be removed. You can see from the pictures it hadn’t been done and I’m pretty sure the port tank had never been touched in 35 years. After removing all 56 1/4 inch tapped bolts we used a submersible pump to remove all the old fuel one 5 gallon jerry can at a time. Surprisingly the inside of the tanks were in pretty good shape. The port tank had a negligible amount of sludge etc on the walls but not enough to warrant a difficult job of attempting a tank wash inside. There are 2 tanks on board and each has a full wall baffle inside and this would make cleaning only 1/2 of each tank possible. So instead of disturbing anything inside we opted to leave well enough alone as the fuel inside was very clean and showed no contaminants or water when we pumped it out. We added a dual Racor fuel system and a stand alone fuel polishing system with a third Racor setup, which could also be used as a backup electric fuel system in the event we experienced any problems with the 1st fuel system. This gallery will be added later. After cleaning debris and sanding the tops of the tanks and the inspection plates we made new gaskets. Lastly installing all 56 bolts again one by one by hand with a 1/4 inch drive ratchet to avoid risking stripping any and to get an even seal around the new plates and gaskets.
