Gas tank fluid removal

[JohnC]

I had to clean a tank on a Mako a few years ago - I found quite a bit of thick sludge in the tank that had to be removed. After removing all of the gas I scraped around the blobs of sludge with piece of soft copper pipe that was taped to a shop vac (I think I poured in a little alcohol as a solvent so that I was sucking something less combustible than gasoline through the vac). It's really hard to do if you cant get to the fuel level sender. The sender is the only hole that's big enough to work through and to see into.

You can buy an inspection camera with a light from Amazon for under $30 (nine is about 1/2" diameter). This plugs into your phone and will give you a good look at your progress, but you need a hole big enough to clean and check your work through. You may be able to put the camera through the fill line but I don't know how much your going to see without being able to articulate it.

The alternative is to keep running gas with fuel system cleaner through until it stops passing bad gas and sludge. You could buy a couple of extra fuel filters and do this but I don't know if you would ever get everything out that way. I tried this but after 4 or 5 clogged fuel filters I was still getting sludge coming through. I couldn't count on the motor running well until I was sure my fuel system was free of crap.