The Dreaded XKE Fuel Tank

I worked late last night on the E-Type.  I slept in for a while this morning.  When I went out to the garage, the first thing I did was clean all the glass from the gauges and carefully wrap them and put them in baggies. I bagged the instruments and the switches and put it all in a box and shelved it until I can get the stuff I need to recondition them from Nisonger. Stuart came over shortly after I got into the garage to work on his Stag.  We had a cup of coffee, and about that time Rodney called and said he was going to come over to help with whatever was needed.  When he got here, we decided to install the fuel tank in the E-Type.  Now the fuel tank in an E-Type is legendary for being extremely difficult to take out and put back in.  When the Brits built the E-Type, they very obviously start at the fuel tank and build the rest of the car around it.  The hole in the rear that it goes in is slightly smaller than the tank, there are 2 hoses that need to be hooked up that can only be reached with one hand by anyone with hands larger than a 3 yr old.  Neither of the 2 hoses really fit the pipe where you have to hook them up.  If you don't put it back in in a very exact sequence, you just won't get it installed, and even then, it's still not a sure thing.  To make matters worse, we spent the better part of an hour just looking for the bag of hardware and rubber pads and the bracket.  We wound up digging the old stuff off of the 69 "Katrina" parts car that we bought a couple of years ago.  The stuff was still pretty nasty, but we cleaned them up and proceeded. We then put some of the remnants of the KoolMat on the floor where the tank would sit.

Amazingly, the tank dropped right into place.  But bolting it down and hooking up the hoses was a totally different matter. 
There is a big hose that is very short, about 4 inches, that connects the filler neck on the side of the car to the filler hole in the tank, we will hook that up last.  Then there is a smaller hose that is a tank vent and hooks to the tank and to a vent pipe in the upper part of the filler neck.  We could get half of the job done before we put the tank in, but the filler neck end was up in that hole where you can only get 1 hand.  I let Rodney handle that hose.  He did a stellar job.we clamped it and started on the bolts.;  The first one went in easily.  The next one was not so easy, we had to remove the first one and I had to run a tap through the 2nd one to make sure that the threads were OK and there was no paint in them keeping us from getting it to start.  Once that was done, we managed to get 2 mounting bolts in.  Then the third mount came. With this one you have to mount the bracket to the rear bulkhead and then start the mounting bolt.  This too was a struggle.  About this time I moved a towel looking for something and found the bag full of the original hardware...  it was no more than a foot away from us the entire time we were working on the tank.  With some difficulty, we got the third and last mounting bolt in.


The tank was mounted!  Now I had to deal with the filler hose.  Another 30 minutes and I had it...  Rodney put the hose clamps on and we were done. Altogether it was probably only a 4 or 5 hour job, but it's done, thank goodness.
(and many thanks to Rodney)

One other thing,  I had ordered a new Data Plate.  It's supposed to be a duplicate of the original.  It came today.  I've gotta say that I am VERY disappointed.  Something about it just didn't look right to me.  I pulled out the original one to compare.  First, it was was not even the right size.  It was a quarter of an inch shorter than the original and the font and spacing were totally different.