An appearances thing
Glenn Looper with the Corvette gas tank
What do you do when the best looking thing from your car is your fuel tank? That is my temporary problem. I picked up my “RENU”ed tank from Looper Servicenter in Rockville, MD – http://www.loopersc.com/ – on Friday and it is embarrassingly fine looking. All of the rust holes have been repaired, the inside and outside has been AL oxide blasted, and all has been coated with “RENU” formulated polyvinyl coatings and lifetime guaranteed. Working with the owner, Glenn Looper was a great and informative experience. He possesses many years of automotive repair experience and was full of great tips and links to other resources. Glen also takes the time to make sure you fully understand the repair process, and he keeps you informed throughout the process, so you can make do or not do decisions along the way. He even took the time to video tape the leak test so I could appreciate how many holes I actually had in the tank. He takes in work from all over the country and has lots of experience with classic cars. Bring a fat wallet, but expect to get a first class job.
Readers of my previous blog entries know that I have been obsessing about “originality”. This seems to be a Corvette owner thing, fostered by obsessive attention to “numbers matching” and all sorts of other unhealthy for your driving “bones” attitudes. The deeper I climb into the Corvette rehab the more apparent it becomes that I can have either a driver or a show car, with no middle ground. I believe that committing to the RENU repair on the gas tank was enough to get me past the ambiguity and commit me to the driver path; so good news there.
The other thing that the “clean enough to swill beer from” tank does is increase my incentive to get on with the clean up and repair. The rest of the car can definitely look this good. The fuel lines are currently soaking with carburetor cleaner. Next I will blow them out and then replace all of the flexible lines and the fuel pump. Even though the car has not run since I rebuilt the carburetor, I think I will pull it apart and replace all of the gaskets and diaphragms, just to ensure that all of the degradable parts in the fuel system are brand new. Check out below to appreciate the kind of gunk that collects in old fuel lines.
Fuel line gunk
