Well yesterday was another one of those days when you unwrap the package and it leaves you disappointed. I was installing a reproduction behind the seat gas tank in a stock 1950 1/2 ton pickup yesterday and ran into problems right from the start. The tank came from Classic Parts of America a earlier this fall. It looks real nice at first glance and next to the original tank it even looked quite original, till you started looking at some of the details.

The first thing that we noticed was the flange on the original one was flattened down in the areas where it sat in the saddle and where the straps went over the top, the flange on the repro wasn’t. now the last thing that you want to do is start bending a welded seam with out any way of leak checking it after it’s bent. The second thing that popped up was the fuel outlet at the bottom. The tank can only sit in the saddle in one way and it is strapped against the back cab braces with rubber bumpers so you really can’t rotate it forward or backward. The pipe nipple is resting against the back of the hole where it goes through the floor pan and it has to be filled out oval shaped for clearance.

But all that wasn’t the killer. When we went to install the fuel filler neck the filler spout and vent tubes were way off angle. There was about 20° misalignment of the filler stub and the vent was pointing toward the front rather than the side and was off by about 30°.
The two pieces of hose that they sent were way to short to make up for any misalignment and would look really bogus even if they were long enough.

So, with all of the tanks that have been replaced in these Advance Design trucks, my question is, did we just get a bad tank or have any of you run into the same sort of alignment problems?????
Denny Graham
Sandwich, IL

Last edited by Denny Graham; 11/22/2009 10:35 PM.
Denny G
Sandwich, IL