Okay, so for 20+ years I wrote books and answered tech questions and forums posts. Today is one of the days when I need to reach out to this excellent community and ask everyone for their advice. I've literally been staring at this for months now, not sure what exactly to do. Looking for insight and hints. This one is not easy - probably the toughest issue I've ever faced working on a particular car. How do you like that lead up! Okay here's the situation.
So you may recall my recent purchase of the Probe 16:
http://forums.pelicanparts.com/off-topic-discussions/1070269-wayne-bought-new-car-who-can-guess-what.html
And the recent threads documenting the restoration:
http://forums.pelicanparts.com/off-topic-discussions/1074841-adams-probe-16-restoration-project.html
For those of you who don't know what this is, here's a link to the Wikipedia page:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Probe_16
Anyways, so they only made three of these cars. The other two are in the UK. One has been "restored" - not back to super-originality, but not terrible either. This one that I have here (AB/3) is the most original of all of them. One of the curiosities of the car is the fact that the chassis is manufactured out of wood (ash wood, I believe). This creates a very unusual set of issues for working on the car (coupled with the fact that there were only three made). I can talk for hours about how cool this design and this car is, but I'll focus on the problem at hand - the gas tanks.
The gas tanks on this car are longitudinal - they run the length of the car. There are two of them, basically embedded into the door sills. There are two fuel pumps, and a switch to change between the tanks and the pumps - there is a union that joins both of the fuel lines after the two pumps. The cars (I believe) were assembled in the following fashion:
a) the wood frame was created
b) the gas tanks were placed / attached to the wooden frame
c) the fiberglass upper body was placed down over the wood / gas tanks
d) the fiberglass body was "glassed in" with the wood making one complete shell.
That's all fine and dandy, except that the gas tanks were uncoated steel - placed in a window sill. What could possibly go wrong. Yes, you guessed it - the window seals leaked and dripped water onto the tanks and they promptly rusted out - from the inside out. This arrangement is not dissimilar to the Porsche 904, which had/has a tubular frame that has a fiberglass body "glassed in" around it. This makes restoring the 904 a very expensive and detailed proposition, as the cars sometimes tend to rust and corrode from the inside out!
Anyways, this gas tank rusting out happened already, and the tanks were replaced with stainless steel ones (thank goodness!!!). I think they are stainless, they might be aluminum, I haven't really looked very, very closely at the actual metal. Either way, they aren't rusting and all is fine with the actual tanks.
Here is a photo that shows the approximate location of the gas tank on the left side of the car (the right side is the same):
To give you some context, one of the other Probe 16 cars (the one that was restore in the UK) had the same problem, and they had to cut the tanks out and John Brookes, writing a newsletter for the Marcos Owner's club or some similar organization printed them. Very useful for me to get perspective on what the job looks like. I think the phrase PIA is represented by this process. Here are some of those photos:
Here is a photo of one of the guys in the UK restoration shop cutting into the side of the car in order to access the gas tank:
Here they are with the tank removed - looks like they are cutting out some of the foam that surrounds the tank or cutting into the wood:
Another shot of the tank removed. It certainly looks like there's a pipe running down the bottom of the tank (yellow), but it's not - is the lower part of the fiberglass body.
Shot of the tank completely removed. This is on the driver's side, you can see there is a little square area cut out in the middle where the ignition switch and other switches go:
Here's a photo of the new replacement stainless steel tank. This is the view from the top of the tank - you can see the opening for the tank sender:
New tank installed. See the gas tank outlet on the lower right of the photo:
