Another 25 Seafari goes under the knife

[Blue_Heron]

Well sorta.

As strick’s 25 Seafari restoration is finishing up, mine is just beginning. I hope I can progress as quickly as he has. The first thing I worked on was the fuel tanks.





I posted last September asking for suggestions to get the heavy varnish out of them. The consensus was to use carburetor cleaner in the gallon size. I couldn’t find it for less than $30 per gallon, and being the tightwad I am, resorted to a mix of lacquer thinner and acetone. Hell, it smelled like carb cleaner. And it dissolved a fair amount of the crud. But it left behind quite a bit of flakey brown residue that I couldn’t rinse out. So I poured in some more lacquer thinner, a bag of marbles, and put both tanks in the bed of my truck for a few weeks. The marbles rolled around and knocked loose more crud and the fresh lacquer thinner dissolved most of the heavy residue. I siphoned out the lacquer thinner and rinsed the tank with soapy water. What I poured out looked like this:





What was left behind was a light flakey material that I couldn’t rinse out and couldn’t reach to scrub out. In a moment of desperation, I even considered cutting one end out of each tank to clean them and then get them welded back. Fortunately, I came up with a better alternative. I had an old gear motor that we used years ago to turn a rotisserie with a whole hog on it. I knew it was still lying around somewhere, but I looked high and low and couldn’t find it. While I was finishing up my shop, I was searching fruitlessly for something else and stumbled across the gear motor. I made up a frame to hold the tank, attached the gear motor to one side and a flanged pipe to the other side for an axle and the Tank TumblerTM was born.




I let it tumble for about four hours and the remaining varnish crumbled into powder that I was able to suck out with my shop vac. The BBs that didn't vacuum out, I removed with a magnet on a string. Rinsed with soapy water, then clean water, then dried, and the inside is clean as a whistle.

This past weekend I pulled the outdrive and motor and lifted the beast off the trailer. Will post more tomorrow or over the weekend.

Dave