Our 1968 Ford Mustang Fuel Tank was so badly rusted we had no choice but to replace it with a new one. After a call to Amazon.com UPS brought us a new steel tank and sending unit. Here is how we prepped and installed the new tank.
We started by removing all the mounting bolts front inside the trunk. Then we cleaned off all the old sealant on the mounting flange.
Here you can see the bare steel that showed up after the flange was cleaned of all the sealant.
After a good cleaning with some lacquer thinner and finally some wax and grease remover we sprayed the flange with some epoxy paint.
I sprayed some rust preventing black paint along the mounting flange to cover the bare steel and prevent rust.
3M makes a great products for sealing the tank. I used their “strip calk”. It is amazing how many uses you will find for this stuff. It is also sometimes called “Dumb Dumb”
Seal the tank to the floor of the trunk with some strip calk.
When you lay out the sealant make sure all the mounting holes are surrounded to prevent any vapors from coming up into the truck.
This is how to apply the strip calk to the mounting flange. Notice how the calk is wrapping around the mounting hole.
Ford did not paint the tanks when the cars were built but I think it is a good idea to paint them with some epoxy rust preventing paint.
We cleaned the oil off the tank and then sprayed it with some epoxy primer to keep it from rusting. The underside of the tank is also coated with an epoxy bed liner material to keep it from getting chipped.
Our old tank was undercoated but it is better to use a catalyzed bed liner as it is more durable.
Here you can see the new sending unit as well as the bed liner material that we sprayed on the underside of the tank.
We specifically used a two part bed liner product to coat the 1968 Ford Mustang Fuel Tank. Here are links to the products featured in this post.