2CV Update: It Now Runs From Its Actual Fuel Tank!

As you may recall from my last 2CV update, I was still driving it using a five-gallon fuel can in the passenger footwell instead of the actual, proper gas tank, which was not working for some reason. Many of you felt that this was an absurdly dangerous way to drive a car, and perhaps even suggested I was driving some manner of wheeled Molotov cocktail, but I don’t know if it was that bad. It wasn’t great, though, that’s for damn sure, and no rational person wanted to get into the car with me, so my priority this weekend was to finally get the car driving from the properly installed fuel tank at the rear, as the French Dieu intended.

I’m happy to say that goal has been accomplished! Of course, I couldn’t have done it on my own: our old pal Andy, who was so crucial in getting our $800 Nissan Taxi to make it across the country, was a huge help here. Huge! The problem turned out to be a lot trickier (or maybe subtler?) than I had anticipated, so the extra help, of both hands and brains, was critical.

But before I could get to that I had another pressing issue to solve, which was my overwhelming abundance of voltage. You may remember last week when I mentioned that after I fixed the bad connection on my alternator, that alternator was putting out way more than the expected 13-15 volts of rich, creamy electrical power. It was usually hitting 17 volts, which is far too many volts.

The voltage regulator seemed to be the best place to start here, so I unplugged the ratty-looking unit and sloppily pried off the cover. Inside, it looked like part of the equipment used to reanimate a corpse (based on the work of Dr. Victor Frankenstein as published in The Lancet), especially because my brain now tends to think of parts like these in terms of solid-state devices, which this is very much not.

Essentially, it seems to work by charging the wire in that coil, which, because it’s wrapped around an iron core in there, acts as an electromagnet, which pulls the little contact point up top down, breaking the contact. With the engine running, when I used my finger to break that contact, the voltage did drop to reasonable levels, so I filed down and cleaned that contact, and it seems to be working properly now? It’s reading between 12.5-13 volts, so I think it’s okay? I’ll keep an eye on it.

Back to the fuel tank situation. When I got the car from our own Stephen Walter Gossin, he had already dropped and cleaned the plastic tank, but because the car wasn’t running then, I don’t think he realized there may have been any issues with, you know, getting fuel out of it. But it sure didn’t seem to want to provide fuel to the engine, bafflingly. We got the car on the lift – where it very likely was the lightest thing ever lifted by that machine – so we could access the fuel tank, which you can see below, looking like a big ravioli peeking out of a hole:

I was happy to see that, for the most part, this car is shockingly rust-free, and even seems to have the remains of some kind of paint under there. Did Citroën paint the underside of these chassis? It may be some anti-corrosion stuff? I’m not sure, but some of it is still there.

There is one good-sized rust hole, under the driver’s side floor, which I need to address at some point soon. That’s just the rubber floormat you can see through the hole! I guess it may be time to “find” a stop sign or something.

We dropped the hilariously tiny (6-ish gallon?) tank to find that the person who had done such a great job fixing my carb maybe did a little less great job figuring out what was up with the fuel tank, as you can see. It seemed like the tank had some leak in it somewhere, and where the fuel gauge sender/fuel pickup mates to the tank seemed the likely place, so it was well-gunked with gray goop.

The goop didn’t help. No gas was getting out of that tank! So, we de-goopified the sender/fuel pick-up straw and pulled it out:

At first, I wondered if the fuel filler at the end of the gas drinking straw was abutting the bottom of the tank, preventing fuel from getting in, but we checked and marked where the filter sat, and there was definitely enough of a gap there to allow fuel to enter.

So now things were getting really confusing; we tried to eliminate the possibility that the newly-installed copper fuel line may have a clog or something by bypassing the line and running the engine from the tank via the same shorter fuel line I was using in the temporary five-gallon fuel can, which should have worked fine, but somehow didn’t.

So what the hell was going on?

We took everything apart again, and then we saw it: at some point, someone had attempted to do a repair on the fuel sender/pickup and had very clumsily welded the straw back on. I may be being generous with the term “clumsy” as the weld looked like a small, pockmarked meteorite shoved there, and there was a hole in that wad of slag, which seemed to be the root of the problem! Air was getting in the hole, preventing gas from getting in there, hence the engine not being able to, you know, run.

Happily, Andy has a welding setup that he proudly claims could weld tinfoil if needed, so he was able to, with the care and precision of a jeweler, close that little hole in the fuel pickup unit.

Then we put it all back together and it worked! I was able to drive it home using a fuel tank not on the inside of the car! Like a millionaire!

There’s still more to do, but this was a very big step! I actually think now I can get passengers to willingly enter the car! Hot damn!