Fuel tank levels...

[LCAM-01XA]

Mike, your fuel pickups are damaged inside the tanks - it's a fairly common issue, the plastic "shower head" part falls off the steel line, so now instead of sucking fuel in from the very bottom of the tank you can only go down to half a tank before the steel line sucks air in. The solution would be to pull the senders off the tanks and extend the 3/8" line with rubber hose till it reaches the sump at the bottom of the tank, some people install a brass T-ee fitting at the hose's end to make sure it don't suck itself against the tank bottom.

 

[mikelara]

right on, thats what i figured. i just havnt built up enough energy to get the service bed off of it to get to it.

 

[damac]

We have all sorts of wierd issues with our tanks reading and running out of fuel. Only good thing about our setup is the tanks fill up fine at the pump, and we can swith between the 2 without a problem.

When we first brought the truck home a few months ago I figured we would just deal with it. We don't use it as a daily driver, but I found it didn't take long to forget about where the fuel levels were and it can get you into trouble when trying to budget and take a trip.

I can see it is best to just pop the bed off when working on these things, but I still haven't found a cheap solution to replumbing these tanks and using some aftermarket sender/gage setup that is affordable.

Also I read somewhere that the pickups are designed in a way to provide for a path of fuel pickup in the case of colder temps and the fuel gelling.

We are willing to take this bed off once to redo everything but I am still looking for aftermaket options instead of paying $400 in ford parts for a design that might not last or give good readings.

 

[rckslash2010]

Talk about lubricating the I.P. I started to run out of fuel in the rear tank one time, as the truck was chugging trying to bring fuel in from the front tank, I dropped it into 4th gear and dumped the clutch. This brought the rpm's up to 2500, and within a few seconds everything primed itself and I kept driving down the highway. Ever since then when the motor is under a heavy load, I can hear something ticking. I figure that I damaged the I.P. from running it with the higher r.p.m.s empty. Everything works fine now, but I'm sure I took some time off it's lifespan.

 

[rckslash2010]

O, and another thing. I can usually get around 185 miles out of the rear tank. Keeping my eye on the trip meter, I was going to switch tanks at 170 miles. Well, I forgot to, and the truck was running a little funny. When I finally realized what I was doing I was at 216 miles, and switched to the front tank. I don't know if I was siphoning fuel out of the front tank or what was going on. Maybe I made a mistake in my calculations and I can actually get more out of my rear tank then I thought.

 

[SparkandFire]

damac - I am looking into the same thing you are, I would like to try and find some sort of universal unit that could be retrofitted to our trucks.

The PO of my truck had Ford install a new sending unit in my front tank about a year ago... Worked good for a while and now it's out again, part of it broke off inside the tank I think.

Ford sending units are garbage, I think they were made in the same factory that built the E4OD's and the Tauruses