• Hi everyone,

    As you all know, Coffee (Dean) passed away a couple of years ago. I am Dean's ex-wife's husband and happen to have spent my career in tech. Over the years, I occasionally helped Dean with various tech issues.

    When he passed, I worked with his kids to gather the necessary credentials to keep this site running. Since then (and for however long they worked with Coffee), Woodschick and Dirtdame have been maintaining the site and covering the costs. Without their hard work and financial support, CafeHusky would have been lost.

    Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve been working to migrate the site to a free cloud compute instance so that Woodschick and Dirtdame no longer have to fund it. At the same time, I’ve updated the site to a current version of XenForo (the discussion software it runs on). The previous version was outdated and no longer supported.

    Unfortunately, the new software version doesn’t support importing the old site’s styles, so for now, you’ll see the XenForo default style. This may change over time.

    Coffee didn’t document the work he did on the site, so I’ve been digging through the old setup to understand how everything was running. There may still be things I’ve missed. One known issue is that email functionality is not yet working on the new site, but I hope to resolve this over time.

    Thanks for your patience and support!

CRACKED FUEL TANK REPAIR?

bronzebronco94

bronzebronco94

Husqvarna
AA Class
hello all! ive been tearing into my crashed husky project here and have been finding more and more stuff thats been damaged. i have a crack in the side of the tank, behind the shroud on the left side. has anybody had luck with plastic welding? or repair goop to seal it up. tank is ok besides this extra drain now. any input would be great. thanks!
 
How large is the crack? If it's small, you may be able to plastic weld/goop it up, but if it's too long, you won't be able to keep it sealed with any stress on the tank.
 
the crack is almost two inches long, low on the tank side. i went to drain the fuel as the first step in teardown only to find it dry.
 
bronzebronco94 said:
the crack is almost two inches long, low on the tank side. i went to drain the fuel as the first step in teardown only to find it dry.
Click to expand...


You should be able to dremel a V into the crack, clean it up and plastic weld it, then once it cures, maybe bond a piece of fiberglass weave over it to keep it from separating.

And I don't bother draining fuel, I just close the petcocks and pull the tank, shrouds and all, off all at once.
 
There are lots of different types of poly used for tanks - some can be welded some not. Best to take it to a plastic welder - the guys that do fenders etc on cars - as they know the difference and best fixes.
 
The big problem with poly tanks is that they leach fuel vapour ... hence most things you try and adhere to them are rejected ... sooner or later. That is why the decals for plastic tanks are perforated - to allow the vapour to escape instead of bubbling the decal. Also poly is molecularly lubricating and rejects most adhesives adding to the challenge ... so any surface that one wants to adhere anything to needs to be either chemically etched or mechanically given a tooth to assist with the grip of the adhesive/resin etc.
 
There are some really good youtube how-to guides on plastic welding that are worth a look. Your best bet to to melt a s/s gauze into the poly for structural strength then poly weld over the top.
 
There's a lot of spot on advice above. What I'd do is follow that advice to get yourself up and running so you can ride in the meantime and then, if I were in your shoes, I'd just replace the thing asap. Second hand they're cheap...you'll find some on eBay and you might find one from a fellow CH member here either by looking in the CH classifieds or by posting a WTB ad there. There are plenty of folks who have gone to larger capacity tanks so one of them may have one collecting dust in a garage. A 2" crack is not insignificant and while a good plastic weld may very well be good for the long haul I'd spring the very few bucks it'll take to gain peace of mind.
 
Replace it have save the money and hassle of a failed repair. Never seen this work well and have tried many methods myself in the past. Not something you want leaking or failing. Bite the bullet and replace.

For short term get me out of the woods it is possible but long term will fail.
 
It's most likely XL-PE (crosslinked polyethylene), which is very hard to fix.
Take it to a pro.
 
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