Today I drug home a 1200 gallon tank. Using a chain winch, I was able to pull it up top of a 20 ft. trailer pretty easily. The trailer is an ugly looking thing that I picked up for a hundred bucks. In a former life it was a camper trailer--who knows where all it traveled to--but then spent lots of years sitting in an orchard as cheap housing for migrant workers over by Cashmere. A front-end loader crushed the camper and I got the trailer frame.
It worked great hauling the tank home despite the 1,000 lbs or so load. Some day I'll have to sandblast and paint the frame, wire it for lights and get a vehicle license for it.
So what I'll do is cut three feet off each end of the tank, put the finished end down (like a cup) weld baffles inside so the fuel doesn't slosh around and then weld a top on (like a lid). The factory seams will be down, where any leaks would be, and our new welds will be on the top, where leaking would be less likely. Still, even with this safe guard, I'm going to have someone else do the welding. I've got a friend, Chuck, who's been welding all his life, who said he'd be glad to help. He also has both a MIG welder as well as a plasma cutter.
The tank is perfect for this: it never had fuel in it, so explosions when cutting won't be an issue, and it is very heavy gauge at 3/16th of an inch.
Three feet of tank at 45" in dia. comes out to about 250 gallons. Minus 10% for air space and that makes it very close to the original Sea Mule tank size of 220 gallons. And, that's two tanks at 220 gallons, by the way, as there is one tank in each hull for each of the two engines.
I'm trying not to think about what it will cost to fuel up....
It worked great hauling the tank home despite the 1,000 lbs or so load. Some day I'll have to sandblast and paint the frame, wire it for lights and get a vehicle license for it.
So what I'll do is cut three feet off each end of the tank, put the finished end down (like a cup) weld baffles inside so the fuel doesn't slosh around and then weld a top on (like a lid). The factory seams will be down, where any leaks would be, and our new welds will be on the top, where leaking would be less likely. Still, even with this safe guard, I'm going to have someone else do the welding. I've got a friend, Chuck, who's been welding all his life, who said he'd be glad to help. He also has both a MIG welder as well as a plasma cutter.The tank is perfect for this: it never had fuel in it, so explosions when cutting won't be an issue, and it is very heavy gauge at 3/16th of an inch.
Three feet of tank at 45" in dia. comes out to about 250 gallons. Minus 10% for air space and that makes it very close to the original Sea Mule tank size of 220 gallons. And, that's two tanks at 220 gallons, by the way, as there is one tank in each hull for each of the two engines.
I'm trying not to think about what it will cost to fuel up....
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