Broken Fuel pickup

[Chevyboy_0]

So i have been doing some researching on the best way to go about fixing this but im curious as to how long something like this would take, at the moment the truck is parked across the street from the house and dont realy have a way to pull the bed or drop a tank, IIRC you can remove the sender with the tank in still. But id like to hear from someone who has experinece with this particular problem.

 

[dakotajeep]

Which tank are you refering to?

I am 99% certian you have to drop the tanks to do this to either tank. I know when I did mine I wouldnt have been able to do it without dropping the tanks or removing the bed. FYI, I personally prefer to removing the bed.....and yes I have done both.

Thad

 

[icanfixall]

The front tank is the easy tank... No need to drop it. Just remove the two fuel lines and the electrical power. Then a hammer and punch or chiesel to knock loose the retainer ring and lift it out. Watch for the locationg pin when you install it again. Otherwise it wont fit correctly... The raer needs to be dropped or the bed taken off. Sorry for that bad news... Why not just refuel the tanks at 1/4 level... Then you never need to do this job...

 

[damac]

I have been researching this as well and it seems it is best to just take off the bed. I don't know how heavy they are but it sure seems like if it was ready to go, me and a guy on each side could just lift it off

We have one gauge that doesn't work and the other acts wierd.

As far as the fuel pickup issue I have read about it allot, but I don't know if we have that problem yet on our 85. We have run out of fuel on the tanks before and the truck seems to just stop? At that time we switch over to the other and proceed on our way like normal.

We have only had the truck a few weeks now and I thought we would be cool with just saving money and leaving it as is, but multiple people drive it and its hard to keep track. We would need a log in there just to guestimate and there is a certain stretch of road that you can't run out of fuel going over the mountain

When we take ours apart I want to mod the system once and be done with it.

 

[Chevyboy_0]

The front tank is the easy tank... No need to drop it. Just remove the two fuel lines and the electrical power. Then a hammer and punch or chiesel to knock loose the retainer ring and lift it out. Watch for the locationg pin when you install it again. Otherwise it wont fit correctly... The raer needs to be dropped or the bed taken off. Sorry for that bad news... Why not just refuel the tanks at 1/4 level... Then you never need to do this job...

I was thinking about that, but the gauge on both tanks reads over full all the time, so im thinking its almost time for a pair of new senders anyway, so ifigure while im doing that i can fix two problems at once

 

[maddenji]

The chances that you have two senders bad would be slim. It sounds like you have a broken wire before the fuel selector. If the wire is broken the gauges will peg to over full.
The pick up is a different story.
JIm

 

[ferrellmedia]

I just did this and dropped the tanks.

If you have the location and tools to lift the bed, I'm sure it would be easier, however, it's only as easy as getting the bolts loose.

As for the retrofit, I just took a short peice of fuel hose with a clamp, cut an inverted V into the hose and used the other tank holes to ensure I got the length perfectly to get the hose exactly to the bottom of the tank.

I'm really not sure how you would get the hose the perfect length if you didn't drop the tanks.

It's really not that hard, BUT THEY MUST BE EMPTY OR YOU WILL MAKE IT 100 x HARDER.

I learned that last part from experience.

 

[Chevyboy_0]

Well i have our shop i could go to with a lift and all the fun/good tools but if i cant get it started then its gonna have to work across the street from the house.

what does the pickup look like? i have heard it looks like a showerhead

 

[franklin2]

If you want to test the wiring, the fuel tank switching unit on the frame rail(which switches the sending unit wires) and the fuel gauge in the dash, put the fuel switch to the proper tank, take the wires off the sending unit, and with the key in run, engine off, ground the sending unit wire, and then take it off ground. Each time you do this, the gauge should swing full scale back and forth. Do this for both sending units, and that will tell you if everything is working, and the sending units are bad. I would not think it would be uncommon for both of them to be bad, since it's very common for them to fail, and most people will keep driving it with one failed unit, and the next unit usually will fail within the next year or so.

The tanks are very hard to pull down. You have to use a floor jack, expecially since you can't get most of the fuel out. That fuel is heavy, and you need to two people even with the floor jack. The tank will suddenly tilt one way, all the fuel will slosh that way, and there it goes out of control. Once you do get it out, you can pour all the fuel out and it's much easier then to get it back in.

The bed removal thing has it's own problems as was mentioned. The main one being the bolts being rusted. On a couple of them I had to take a 4 inch grinder and grind the heads off in the bed, and then lift the bed off. Then you have to take a sawzall and cut the rest of the bolt off to get it out of the frame.

But taking the bed off, you can go ahead and clean the frame up and paint it, and no matter how you pull the tanks, I would take this opportunity to redo the tank venting. I plan on doing mine, since filling it up with fuel is a nightmare. One of the posters was describing how he threaded a 1/2 pipe fitting into the rubber of the original vent in the tank, I think I am going that route.

 

[franklin2]

Well i have our shop i could go to with a lift and all the fun/good tools but if i cant get it started then its gonna have to work across the street from the house.

what does the pickup look like? i have heard it looks like a showerhead

Can you pour a 5 gallon can of fuel in one of the tanks and then take it to the shop?

 

[Chevyboy_0]

i was thinking about it. but then i remembered the shop is crammed full of a bunch of old Chevys right now, and it would take forever and a day to get them all moved out of the way in a manner to get the truck in there, i wish the shop was bigger for that reason. with 1800sqft and having an office, and a rotray lift, and 2 camaros, 2 bel airs, a nova and a 57 truck in there space is very scarce...

 

[jim x 3]

C Boy:
(My info relevant for 1988) Yes the pickup looks like a showerhead (or inverted funnel) with a 1/16" mesh screen in the large end. I think its made of rubber but mine was so hardened it had cracked and literally disintegrated, falling off the 3/8 steel fuel line. There is a 1-way rubber check valve above the screen which would allow unfiltered fuel into the line if the screen was plugged (with gelled fuel). I'm replacing mine with a doubled rectangle of screen soldered into a 3/8 steel line to be attached to the existing steel with a short piece of 3/8 rubber fuel line.


Madden:
Both my senders are the same age and they are both bad, with open (infinite resistance) areas between F and E. This makes the gauge read above F. The potentiometer is a ceramic wafer with silver traces silkscreened on and utilizing a carbon resistor pad in 3 sections down the sides. There is a wiper attached to the float rod that is grounded. The float rod travels thru 90 degrees from bottom to top, E to F. I plan to replace this with a discrete potentiometer of proper magnitude and a 22 ohm fixed resistor. If anyone knows how this will hold up to immersion I'd like to know.


Franklin:
Your wiring and gauge test procedure is good. Even better is to put a 22 ohm resistor between the sender connector and ground. With key on the gauge should read E. Then use a 160 ohm resistor - gauge should read F.

Regards,

 

[Chevyboy_0]

So upon further inspection, the shower head is intact on the front tank, and the front tank is absolutly full of fuel. So now im thinking the Lift pump is the culprit of my no start

 

[jim x 3]

C boy:
If you sucked air running on the aft tank then your lift pump needs to refill the entire fuel system from the selector valve forward. This will take a lot of cranking. 1. Disable your GPs. 2. Key on 3. Crank with rest intervals from under the hood 4. Purge air and check for fuel at the schrader valve on the fuel filter head.

Regards,

 

[Chevyboy_0]

thats the thing ive only been running off the front tank, another thing i forgot to mention is that while i was under there i noticed what looked like a vent tube coming from the top of the tank and was clamped on the seam of teh tank, is this the correct mounting place for the vent tub or should it be mounted somewhere else?