TheSamba.com :: View topic

Sun Oct 06, 2002 5:58 am

I'm in the "R" zone on my gas gauge with a bunch of teenage girls (no, just my daughters' friends) and we go around a curve on an uphill ramp and the car starts to slow down, stops, and after about 20 seconds with the ignition on it starts up again...to make a long story short, I think there's gunk in the gas tank (it's an original 22 year old beetle) and I think as it gets down to the bottom and sloshes around the gunk gets in the fuel line. Thank goodness for fuel injection because the electric fuel pump keeps pushing fuel through until the gunk is out of the line (although it just gets recirculated back to the tank). Short of taking the tank out, is there any way to eventually dissolve the gunk by putting something in along with the gas on a regular basis? Oh, and one of the teenagers kept saying "Should we get out of the car? I've heard about how these cars explode!"

Sun Oct 06, 2002 12:20 pm

you should have reassured her that its the pintos that explode vws just burn to the ground.... she needs to get her facts striaght lol =)

Sun Oct 06, 2002 1:34 pm

You probably don't have to worry about gunk getting in the fuel line, as there is a screen in the fuel outlet, to prevent that very thing from happening. This is a pretty easy fix, and one that every new enthusiast should undertake, with an empty tank: 1. disconnect your battery. 2. disconnect the wire from the sender in the top of your fuel tank. 3. unbolt the tank clamps, and loosen the hose clamps holding the filler neck to the tank. 4. lift the tank up, and remove the fuel line (flex line between the tank and the hard line which goes through the tunnel). 5. remove tank. 6. turn tank upside down. see the fitting in the bottom, with the nut on it? that is where that little screen resides. carefully remove nut and check the gunkage level inside. toss fittings in a little can of Varsol, Gunk, or kerosene, to clean em up. 7. toss a handful of clean nuts, bolts, washers in the filler neck of the tank, along with a pint of varsol (or equivalent), and stuff a shop rag into the filler neck. 8. reinstall now clean pick-up fitting. 9. shake the tank around, getting all the loose crap and corruption scraped off the inside by the action of the loose hardware inside. 10. pull out shop rag, and drain crappy looking solvent into a container. repeat a couple of times, if solvent looks really nasty. 11. when satisfied, shake empty tank until all the nuts, bolts, and washers have fallen out. 12. reinstall tank, with a new length of gas line between tank and tunnel.

Mon Oct 07, 2002 5:33 am

Wow. Very nice, bljones. You make it sound very easy. Thanks for the detailed procedure. I'm tempted to try it. As for the teen, Jakub, yeah, telling her there's no danger of explosion, there's plenty of time to get out while it burns, that oughta do it LOL.