We’re in a crunch with our Volkswagen bus disassembly, we need to get the engine out and clean out the gas tank, then get everything put back together for a thousand mile drive!

Kyle’s dad has a huge garage for us to use, virtually any tool we asked for was on a shelf somewhere. That’s why we’re here! He even had a 70 gal/min pump to pump the fuel out of the tank, so no one had to drink gasoline to get a siphon going. Kyle then got to work disconnecting the engine, leaning heavily on the instructions from Ratwell.

The last time we did this, we took out the engine and transmission as one unit. This time, Kyle tried to remove only the engine, but it was a nightmare. All the incremental movements of lifting the bus and moving the engine a quarter inch, then lowering the engine then trying to move it again, take a few more parts off, see if it will slide further now…. There’s no way we’re going to get it lined up with the transmission, so we’ll take the transmission out tomorrow.

We were successful, by the end of the night the engine was out. Now we can remove the gas tank and finally clean out whatever crud has been clogging our fuel lines for the past two years.

Kyle had the transmission out by the time I got to the garage the following morning.

We seem to have an oil leak from the clutch/flywheel area, which must have been masked by parking in a dirt parking lot for the past year. There’s a little oil in the transmission housing, and that area is supposed to be dry. I took the clutch and flywheel off so we can figure out where that is originating from.

It’s likely the crankshaft oil seal (rear main seal), we found a large buildup of junk on it. The seal itself is may be fine, but since we’ve got it taken apart now and we’ve got to order parts anyway, we’re going to replace it.

While I was doing that, Kyle got the gas tank out. It seems to have been glued in pretty well. One of the best things about our bus is that the previous owners didn’t change much, when we dropped the engine four years ago nearly everything was OEM, in fact, we believe we were the first ones to take the engine out. This was definitely the first time the gas tank has moved since it was installed 43 years ago.

After that, he flushed the tank with water and a chain.

It took a few rounds of rattling the chain around and refilling with water, but we got 3 or 4 cups of debris out of the tank. No wonder we were constantly getting fuel clogs!

Ken says this is dried up gasoline, which makes sense as the previous owner (bless his heart) trailered the bus around rather than fixing it so it would run, so a few gallons of gas probably sat in the tank for a while and dried up.

He added some water and muratic acid to the tank, it was a little too old so it didn’t do much. After that we were at a stopping point, we ordered parts from busdepot but there’s not much else we can do while we wait for those to come in.

The next day Kelly was heading to the OBX so I went along with her and we picked up a new jug of muratic acid. A few treatments of that cleaned the tank, then Kyle added a heavy duty degreaser and let it sit overnight. We’re going to coat the interior in ATF then reinstall it.