Airportable wrote:

I’ve waded through that lot & im still not totally happy. A number of the winter jobs are in the doors, including fitting remote window switches just up from the inner handle. This is a more intuitive position than behind the gear stick.
M
 

I've worked for various plastics manufacturers and recyclers over the years, in fact I've worked in a vast array of manufacturing fields due to being a contractor who's specialty is plant installation and relocation means I move about a lot so always dealing with something new, always learning....the day I stop learning is the day I will have dropped dead!
I can't imagine working in the same place day after day year after year doing pretty well the same thing my whole working life. Even then I've wandered in and out of other fields like highrise construction, telecommunications, ship building, and rail. Still so much yet to learn and have a crack at!

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Plastic fuel tanks are made from HDPE, High Density Poly Ethylene,
Often SoarnoL is added.
 

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DRY ICE! That would be both cheaper and more effective at shrinking the tank, than gas, you'd need to let it boil off before trying to remove the tank as it might make the tank too brittle, at the weight would make removal more difficult, but hopefully it would go back to it's original dimensions and stay there due to it's plastic memory.

The use of a plastic tank would've been motivated by the same old reason we have to suffer the fall out of stupid decisions.....Cost!  tooling for roto-molding is much cheaper to make and maintain than the stamping dies for pressing  out metal sheet, and all you have to do is pump the required amount of molten plastic from the extruder into the mold and multi axis spin it to use the centrifugal force to make to hollow form you require, where as you need to stamp out the sheet metal and them weld the two halves and any other shaped features such as the filler tube neck and any double skinning required like the gauge/ fuel pump mounting points, brackets etc. to a fuel tight seal!

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Yesterday was a fairly warm day. And plastics do suffer from a great amount of thermal expansion, the trouble is getting a sufficient amount of chiller agent to do the job and the last thing you need is any extra weight as getting this thing out will be hard enough as it is.
Steaming the crap outta the guts of it then maybe purging it with an inert gas like CO2   or N2 , might do it, but all this experimenting is starting to sound expensive, would it be easier to just cut the bastard up and replace it, but off course that would depend on a replacements availability, probably not all that thick on the ground here in OZ, second hand units are most likely next to non existent due to the fact that no bastard can get 'em out, and new ones are probably hideously expensive to to the cost of shipping something of that bulky.

Some years ago the company I worked for had a demolition job at a functioning tobacco factory, It was a fixed price quote, and amongst the problems we had was to demolish a large  concrete bund.... this bastard of a thing was made in a way that I'd never encountered the reinforcing wasn't by steel bar, no it was a random network of fine strand wires a bit like fiberglass pumped through a chopper gun! This stuff was tough sledge hammers hardly made any impact and jack hammers were way to slow and labourious. to make matters worse this bund was located on an upper floor!

What I did was get in an excavator, (what you Poms call a digger) But this came with a whole new set of problems, 1st was one of access, I craned it into the upper floor, with a bloody great crane, then the client quite understandably didn't want diesel exhaust gasses in their still working factory, so I got as much flexible exhaust pipe as I could muster,and attached this to the diesel's exhaust but it still wasn't long enough to reach outside the building so it was in turn attached to some PVC drainage pipe to get the sufficient reach to get the pestulant gasses outside. this Heath Robinsonesque set up actually worked with me dragging the hose and pipe combination around as the excavator worked. 
Well this got us outta trouble, but here is the relevant bit, it was amazing how much the PVC pipe expanded with the exhaust heat it swelled up to a much larger diameter It wasn't to hot to handle with my hands so there was sufficient length of flexible exhaust to allow it to cool with out melting the PVC, but still it swelled to buggery!

Anyway back to the original problem.........I got me some thinking and research to do!
I wanted some mad science thinking to do when I cooked up the K series V8 thread........and now providence has provided some..... the moral of this story is be careful of what you wish for!
And right now, currently my wishes involve thousands of tiny demons with red hot pitchforks tormenting the gentleman's sausage, wedding vegetables and fundamental orifice of both the bastard at the petrol station and the dribbling idiot who came up with the plan to use a plastic fuel tank!

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I wondering if I could employ steam to speed up the reaction by removing the petrol residue in the tank? I have a small steam generator of the type used by dry cleaners.....hmmmmn!

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Airportable post=209086 userid=5200I’m flying by the seat of my pants (Jockettes)on this one. But if you bung up the holes, bar one & apply an industrial vacuum to that, you might reduce its volume by that tad you need for it to pop out.
M

 Nah I think you'd need a bit more of a vaccum than you'd  be able to generate with a domestic or even comercial vaccum cleaner,  if I were to go that way, I  suspect I'd be more likely to get results by enlisting physics to help if I could fill it with hot water, seal it, and somehow shock cool it.......it will collapse, but how to do that without crushing it to the shithouse is the question ? Too risky really. And the problem outer dimensions probably wouldn't contract, it would just suck the sides in.
The problem is really one of chemical reaction, I suspect a subtle blend of time, psychology and extreme violence will win out!

Yeah it would seem the numpties didn't allow for the fuel tank expansion when the drew the comics that passed for blueprints!
I've found elsewhere that yes they do indeed expand and apparently they will contract again once the fuel is removed, but.....and here's the good bit....It can take up to  8 weeks!
If ever I meet the bloody moron that made the decision to use a plastic fuel tank in these things......I'll go all medieval on his sorry arse, no torture will be too inhumane for this dipshit!

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Well some fun and games today, went to replace the fuel pump and found the fuel tank full of rust flakes! given it's a plastic tank that's quite an achievement!
So that explains why the pump is buggered then...... it gets worse my jag has the same problem.......bloody petrol station must be supplying shit dirty fuel! Tight Bastards too miserable to do any maintenance!,
There is that much crap in there, that I have to remove the tank to clean it properly.
So I start to remove it, out with the t-bar, soft top, seats, seat belts, centre console, air filter box, remove fuel filler, rear carpet, rear bulkhead insulation, rear bulkhead panel.... now according the the workshop manual all I have to do is remove the tank..........well the damned thing is bigger than the hole it is supposed to come out of!
I seem to remember reading somewhere, the ad and sorry tale of some poor sod that had to do this, but do you reckon I can find it? Nah of course I can't, did a search no luck there, trolled through the how tos, nah not there either.
I thought the as a how to somewhere, but apparently not! had I had known we didn't have one I might've bothered recording the process in pix, a vid would be almost impossible to do due to the lack of room.
So I'm up to the point of trying to extract the fuel tank but cant see what's holding it. And have called end of play for the day. Much swearing and cursing was issued, and a blood sacrifice was made
Maybe the tank has expanded with age, I know this happens to Fords with plastic tanks, The series Falcons came with a 80 litre tank when they were new in @1980, but they all hold about 85 litres now!
So I was hoping I could find where whoever had done it, had actually got the bloody thing out.
I can see it needs to be rolled out bottom first as that's going to be the only way the get the filler and pump mounting out but the bloody thing gets wedged in and jams at the flange round the centre tunnel. I was hoping to to need to apply shitloads of senseless violence, ATM I see little other choice as finess has failed. If I had 5mm I'd shit it in.

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D be careful when doing/undoing the bleed screw on the radiator, being plastic it is easy to strip the thread or round the head off.
So DON'T use a shifter (adjustable  spanner) actually you should never use these stupid contraptions anyway.,,,,,,,Woe betide any apprentice of mine who was caught with one of these instruments of Satan in their position! They would come back from lunch to find the horrid thing brazed to their tool box, it would have to remain there for the rest of their time as an apprentice, as a reminder to always use the correct tool for the job!
 

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When the Royal Australian Army retired the Centurion tanks the sold them off to the public, so there are still some lurking in private collections and hidden away on farms, there were huge piles of spares that were also sold off.
I'm not sure what happened to their Leopard Tank replacements, but I don't think they were sold off to the public, certainly the just retired early version Abrahams tanks (49 of them) are off to Ukraine having been donated by our Government, since we acquired the latest versions.
 

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The Meteor was used in the Centurion tanks it was the detuned naturally aspirated version of the Merlin

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