Morris Minor Owners Club

I am planning to increase the capacity of the standard Minor fuel tank. I find 29 litres/6.5 gallons not enough these days with petrol stations closing and me frequently undertaking lengthy journeys. In addition to carrying the emergency one-gallon can I intend to cut a Minor tank in half i.e. remove the bottom and weld in a sandwich piece. There is plenty of room for downwards expansion under the Minor and without doing any calculations I believe the capacity could be increased to about 9 gallons quite easily. It would be simple to extend the sender unit or use one from a bigger car. The useful extra capacity will be a boon on long and frequent trips.
I see larger tanks being offered by some of the usual suppliers and see the subject has been discussed on the forum before. By extending the original tank you would still be able to stow the spare wheel in its rightful place.

Interesting and seems to make sense.

The bottom off an Escort van tank , the top MM...

EDIT...

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Will try later


John ;-)

Try this...

https://www.morrisminorowners.co.uk/vie ... 2&start=75

John ;-)

I did this a couple of years ago and ran into problems with the sender unit. I tried a few different ones with longer arms and never got it to work right. I got a 9 gallon tank made out of Stainless where I work at an engineering company.

I ended up using the original sender. It meant when my gauge read empty, I had around 3 gallon left. Didn't bother me

All good ideas BUT by using an existing minor tank and even preferably a second one which has rotted but the sides are still sound, I can save money and do less work - which is particularly appealing to me!

Morning all.

Apologies for the delay in replying but I did exactly that. When I did mine a few years ago, all the larger replacement tanks protruded into the spare wheel's space which was something I didnt want. I got 2 secondhand tanks and cut the top off one and the bottom off the other keeping as much of the "straight" sections as possible. I ended up "quartering" the new bottom piece as the tank is a bit tapered but all worked out ok once all the sections were welded back together. It does obviously protrude lower than before but not too much that it bottoms out on anything. I think the capacity ended up around the 9 gallon mark and to calibrate the gauge, i made a longer sender arm and filled it with a gallon of water at a time to see what the gauge read. I bent the arm to suit but erred on safety so it takes a while to drop off the full reading and reaches empty with still a couple of gallons left.
Cheers, Colin.

Great stuff, I am pleased it was a success.