Tanking along

I wanted a petrol tank for the unusual German two stroke I found a few weeks ago & the first thing my eyes lighted upon at Enstone was one of they torpedo shaped ATCO lawnmower tanks. It had both tap and lid, seemed devoid of damage & was a quid. Half an hour with a brass cup brush found a couple of pinholes, but Plastic Metal has been my answer to this problem for some years now & a couple of blobs fixed the holes & rubbing down reduced the stuff to an acceptable profile.

I'd found a plain two gallon petrol can (Valor 1945) for £3 & had initially thought to cannibalise it for its thread as I have a number of caps to hand. Unfortunately, close examination showed it to be free of holes in the body with three very tiny pinholes in the top, easily fixed as above. Some Nitromors turned the several-coats-of-paint surface into turbid slop & washing it off revealed that the great majority of its original tin plate was present.

The Bernard W112 I bought at Newbury was cheap & had a tank that needed work.

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It is oblong & of quite thin tinned steel sheet, its shape & ribbing keeping it in some kind of shape. It took a bit of tin bashing to get it looking reasonable again, the tap bushing needed sorting out & soft soldering back into place. The cap was entirely gone, the jagged remains of the threaded portion requiring some inventive thought & it was this tank that I'd originally intended to fit with the cannibalised two gallon can fitting. After a bit of searching about the workshop, I found an old Evostik tin and chopped off the top. Close examination of the tank showed that the original cap fitting had been soft soldered onto the top & I removed the ring of jagged steel for a base pattern. It took quite a while to get a decent tinned flat surface on the Evostik fitting, but it was done in the end & soldering it to the tank was the easy bit. A tiny drill in the Dremel made an air hole through the cap & a plastic disk seal cut from a milk container completed the job & it looks perfectly normal, revealing no trace of its sticky origins!

Another venture currently in hand is the re-use of an Edgar Westbury 80 Watt engine & generator that came to me sans its other fittings. I'd found it a small carb from the mortal remains of a Bridges Field Drill & the next bit was to find it a suitable tank. I have an Army field stove that isn't complete, but it does - well, did - have its petrol tank. Of suitable diminutive proportions, it is designed to be run pressurised & is of sturdy copper, the domed ends both swaged and silver soldered into place. The pump was removed and a copper disk soft soldered over the hole. The burner supply pipe was chopped off short, the boss drilled & a copper pipe soldered into place & shaped to run around the cylinder. Nitromors fetched the remains of the paint off & it looks the part in polished copper against the brushed matt aluminium of the cooling shroud.

I spent the rest of Sunday masking up and then spraying the various pressed steel containers with grey primer to keep the rot bug at bay, never far away in this weather.

Regards,

Kim Siddorn

Reply to
kimsiddorn
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Reply to
Charles Hamilton

Kim I've got a filler neck and cap that I removed from an aertex petrol can some years ago. It's yours if you want it.

Fred

Reply to
g6zru

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