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What's going on everybody
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It's Technicians Tuesday, and this week we will be back on the Ocean Master to go over
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pressure testing the boat's fuel tank. Before getting started, there are a couple of things we are going to need in order to test
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the tank. Most of this stuff you can find at your local hardware store, or like everything else, you can
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get them from Amazon. The first thing we need is this inflatable pipe plug. You put air
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into it here and this expands to close off a pipe or a hose that you put it in. Then
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we'll need a pair of hose pinch pliers. These just close on a hose and pinch it off
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Then we'll need to make a pressure testing tool by taking a 3 eighths inch fuel
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hose and a low pressure pressure gauge and hooking them together with a T fitting
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and putting a shreder valve on the end of it to be able to put air into the tank
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With these we will be able to pressure test the tank and we will need an air tank in
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order to put air into the fuel tank I just took two male fittings and coupled them together to make filling up the air tank easier Once we get the air tank full of air we can go to the boat and check out the tank
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We'll start by taking our pipe plug and plugging off the fill hose by sticking the plug into the fill port down so the plug itself is inside the hose and we'll just give a couple of blasts of air to snug up the plug to where we can't pull it out
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Now we need to plug off the vent hose next and depending on the kind of boat, you might
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have to take off an access panel like this to get to the hose
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But once you get the panel off, we can just take our pliers and pinch off the vent line
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like this. Sometimes these hoses are dry rotted and will crack easily when you pinch down on them
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So be careful of that. Then the last thing that we will need to do is pull up the access to the pickup tubes and
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will remove the engine fuel line from the hose bar. It's important when taking off an old fuel
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line like this, especially with fittings that look like this, that we make sure there is some
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extra fuel line and we'll just take a utility knife and cut a slice into the fuel hose starting
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at the end of the hose bar. Over time, with heat and the fuel, fuel lines will basically weld themselves
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onto these hose barbs and you can spend a lot of time getting frustrated and struggling to get the hose off the pickups You can even break the barb off and I just going to show you here that you can have a real issue on your hands if it breaks
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We are going to be replacing this tank anyway but in reality you want to just take a screwdriver and work to slice open and just push the hose off of the barb
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take our pressure testing tool that we made and stick the three eighths inch hose onto the
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tank's pickup tube so that we can start pressurizing the fuel tank. It's extremely important that
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you never put more than three pounds of pressure into a fuel tank. I normally like to stick around
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two and a half pounds just to stay on the safe side because you can pop one of the tank's welds if we
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put too much air inside the tank, creating a huge problem if not ruining the tank. It might take a little
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bit to get the pressure up depending on if the tank is full or not, but just apply short blast
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of air into the tank until you get to about two or two and a half pounds. Once we've got the
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tank pressurized, we'll take some soapy water and spray the fuel cinder and the pickups looking
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for air bubbles Depending on how bad the tank looks sometimes you can get lucky and just find some air leaks on the pickups or on the fuel cinder Simply sealing the cinder or replacing the pickup tubes can fix a leaky fuel tank and save some
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serious money. If you don't find any leaks on the pickup or the cinder, check the vent and the
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fill to make sure they aren't leaking and look into the builds to see if fuel is coming out
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letting us know that the fuel tank has holes in it and needs to be replaced. We can take off
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hose pinch pliers and remove the inflatable pipe plug from the fill to close out our day
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here for this week's technicians Tuesday. If this is your first time on the channel here, check out some of our other videos and get
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subscribed so you can keep up with our progress as we go through the complete restoration
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process of this boat over the next couple months. If you found this video interesting, don't forget to hit that
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like button and check us out on our website at born again boating.com where we have all kinds of
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helpful boating articles answering all kinds of boating questions. Thanks for watching. We hope
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you enjoy your Tuesday night and look forward to seeing you on next week's video
