Heres what I'm wondering. I'm slowly getting parts blasted and powdercoated, ready for reassembly. And I'd like to do the gas tank. Problem is, of course, the plastic crap inside the tank. Now...is that stuff even necessary? I'm assuming it's basically just to keep the fuel sort of near the middle of the tank as best as it can during cornering and accelleration. Am I correct? And I noticed a lot of it is cracked near where the fuel pump and such hang, I'm sure thats quite common, the things are 22 years old now. The inside of my tank looks really nice, no corrosion or anything. The outside, not so much. I mean, if worse comes to worse, I could have it sandblasted, and just paint it myself with POR15 or something that'll coat and protect it.

I guess the question is this: can you remove the plastic without breaking it all? How would you do that? Will it be reinstallable, or does everything work fine without it? Is it even necessary?

Or...I suppose the other option, and some of you might have experience with this; maybe the plastic inside the tank is strong enough to hold up to the ovens heat in the powerdercoating process? They told me 400 degrees, but I am not certain if that was degrees celcius (as I'm in Canada), or Farenheit.

[This message has been edited by paulaxe (edited 06-23-2009).]

Most likely it's 400F. I would have no idea if that temp would melt the plastic in the tank or not. Maybe you could get one of the broken bits out and test it.

Another option is to ask them if they have any heat lamps which they could use. That method gets the surface of the part up to the required temp but would hopefully leave the rest of it at a greatly reduced temp. Heat lamps are commonly used for curing powercoating when items are too large for the oven.

Hey Paulaxe (and fellow Canadian), welcome to the forum. I'm in the process of reconditioning a tank as well, and here's what I've found so far. The plastic baffle in the tank is exactly as you guessed... it's to keep the fuel pump surrounded by fuel under all conditions. In older carburetted cars, you always had a reserve of fuel in the fuel bowl when you went around corners if the fuel pump pick-up tube ended up above the fuel line. Not so in a fuel injected car. You need to keep the fuel pick up tube submerged at all times, so keeping the baffle in the tank is a good idea. The other thing is that there's no way to get it out to be able to put it back in later. It gets put in there before they crimp the two halves of the tank together.

So, for you, since your tank is clean on the inside, the only thing you have to worry about is painting the outside... or so you might think. I thought mine was pretty good too until I beadblasted it and primed it with epoxy. After it was all one uniform color I could see four tiny pinholes through the tank walls at the holding straps locations. I was quite surprised as I thought I had inspected it pretty well. This is probably what you want to do as well to be certain you have no holes. If you find any pinholes, the only way to go, is to coat the interior with a special gas tank sealer. I haven't bought any yet but am at that stage.

As for powdercoating... I doubt the plastic baffle will withstand the temperature in the oven (by the way it's 400*F, but some powder coating can be cured closer to 300*F). If it's broken up somewhat as you say, try to get a piece out and stick it in the oven for ten to fifteen minutes to see. It would be a hard lesson learned if you tried powder coating a perfectly good tank only to ruin it. Any two part catalyzed epoxy or urethane paint will do just as nice a job on something you'll never see unless it's on the hoist. My 2 cents worth anyway.

FWIW, I coated the outside of the tank on my car with Hurculiner brush on. If the inside did have rust then Kreem works good. I used this on a motorbike I restored. I would be very concerned about 200C temps on the baffles. My guess is they would crack and get brittle.