Originally I had installed MV Spares’ felt air deflector seals which I had purchased many years ago at an MV Convention. Remember those? After I installed them, along came TJ Zackman on the G503 forums, selling a much more accurate product. At a price of about $50 it seems like TJ is doing well with his offering.
Upon opening the box from TJ I found three precisely cut air deflectors, well labeled as to which side goes inside/outside and which edge to staple to the grill. The hair is a near perfect replica of the remnants I found on my original grill.
He also sends a small runner of appropriately sized staples which are thin enough to work by hand and not require a strong crimping tool when installing.
The seals have one thicker side which staples towards the grill.
After installation I had a quick check with the grill laid in place on the frame. Here’s how the air deflectors fit. Overall, much improved over the previous carpet felt.
During my early trial drives of the jeep I found that I had some leakage from the fuel tank. Likely this was coming from the drain plug, but it got me to thinking about corrosion. Here in California we have fuel with a significant percentage of hygroscopic alcohol which absorbs water from the air. This denser water then sits in the bottom of a tank and corrodes it from the inside. I’m sure all of this is well known to you, the reader. My tank has sat around for the last three years so there is likely a bit of corrosion present as well.
I decided to seal the inside of the tank with POR-15. I’ve enjoyed using their cleanser and rust treatment products, so I thought to use their tank sealer. I also had the pre-treatment products in the garage, so using the $15 sealer would be cheaper than using another company’s products.
Here’s the inside of the tank before I began. Some light corrosion and gunk.
The instructions call for first cleaning the tank with their cleaner/degreaser. You mix one bottle of cleaner with an equal volume of hot water, pour in, then rotate the tank to new positions every hour or so. I thought that I had the tank clean, but this treatment sure pulled out more contamination. After the cleaner is drained the tank gets rinsed numerous times and dried. This first drying doesn’t need to be super thorough as the next product is the POR-15 rust treatment, a mixture of phosphoric acid and zinc phosphate. These types of rust treatment products contain an acid/base buffer to maintain pH in the acid range. The acid oxidizes the iron and zinc phosphate is preferentially deposited. Once this treatment is applied, the tank is rinsed many times and thoroughly dried with a hair dryer. Here’s the result. So far, so good.
Once the tank is fully dry then the sealer can be gently stirred and poured into the tank, which is then slowly rotated so that all surfaces get covered. I did this for about 45 minutes and I made sure to blow compressed air through the fuel pick-up tube to clear it of any sealer.
Then the tank is drained for 30 minutes, and now we face the main challenge of this process: how to drain our Olaco tanks fully. It’s actually impossible to full drain the tank as the drain plug sits above the bottom of the tank. Try as hard as you can, you’ll still have excess sealer in the tank, as seen above. What I should have done was rotate the tank to the upside down position so that excess sealer would dry on the top of the tank. Instead, I leveled the tank and let the excess dry in the bottom. Here’s the result. I’m not sure if these are bubbles, and if this treatment will fail. I guess only time will tell. I also did not treat the vertical guides for the fuel filler neck as the neck was already a very tight fit. So, there we have it. These same problems would have occurred with any other sealer product.
Restoration of 1945 Ford GPW 270351 