Fuel Tank Fillers

When we arrived to take delivery of our truck, before we even opened the door to look inside, we noticed that the filler necks for the diesel tanks were a problem. The issue was whether we would be able to get a filler nozzle into the opening. The builder argued that we could, but in reallity, it was going to be difficult. Something we proved by going to the nearest gas station with the builder, and trying.

The necks were buried over a foot back from the outside wall of the camper, underneath the box. Exacerbating the problem was the 4" tall aluminum trim that was mounted to the bottom perimeter of the box. It meant we had to fight to get a retail nozzle into the tank, and at that, two years of trying has proved that only about 70% of the retail nozzles would go in. Many of them have large square advertising badges on the top of the handles which prevents us from getting the nozzle in the tank fillers. The height above the filler neck is too short, and the handle hits the underside of the box before the nozzle tip can go far enough inside the filler neck to work.

What made this even worse was that there was no way possible to get any of the larger nozzles at the truck stops into the tanks. This means we can't take advantage of the higher volume pumps, a desirable thing when taking on 250 gallons of fuel, and we can't fill both tanks at the same time. This is what truck stops are all about. They have linked filler pumps on both sides of the truck. At a retail station, we have to fill one tank, and then turn the truck around to fill the other side.

We can also forget about many foreign country fuel stations as well. Even a quick search online shows that many of these foreign pumps have long nozzles with very little curve on the tip, and they don't have the swivel joint where the hose enters the handle like we do here.

This builder promotes himself as an expert at building expedition trucks for travel around the world. If so, why then did I see the problem 5 minutes after viewing the truck for the first time, and they didn't? If they really were experts, then they would know all about this issue, and have it as an important detail to look for when starting a truck build.

Our unfinished fuel tanks were on the truck when they attached the cabin to the truck frame. So it was easy to see there was a conflict. Since they had to do welding on the tanks to install the mount for the boiler and generator fuel pickups, it would have been a simple thing to add filler necks at that point so they would be easy to fill. But they didn't. They just sent the tanks out to be sandblasted and powder coated.

If they had moved the filler necks at the same time they welded in the pickup plate, it would have taken only a couple of hours at most. The cost of two new fillers with locking caps is $150 for the pair of them. That’s a total of $350 when adding in the two hours at their shop rate of $100 per hour. A simple phone call or email from them would have been all that was needed to get our approval for this relatively minor extra cost.

What's even more infuriating is that as their very unhappy customer was about to drive away, the builder actually had the nerve to say that when we got the truck back home, we should drain the diesel out (as much as 250 gallons worth), remove the tanks, hole saw new locations, weld in new filler necks and then re-powder coat the tanks. At a minimum, this would probably be a $2,500 hit.

Fast Forward Three Years

Seventy percent. That’s about the best we could do filling our tanks at retail gas stations using the small filler nozzles meant for cars. Either we couldn’t get into the station because of it’s tight geometry, or we couldn’t get the nozzles into the tank because of advertising placards on the body of the filler nozzle. We certainly couldn’t fill up at any of the proper truck stops like we should.

Well, we’d finally had enough of this frustration. The time had come to incur the significant cost of moving the filler necks. Fortunately, we found a shop that could do the whole job for us, and this came courtesy of the outer wall de-lamination.

The previous year when we had to redo the wall repair that the builder failed to do properly, we had to repaint the wall after the fix. We used a semi-truck body shop for this, and since then, used them again to paint the mounting feet for our roof rails so they’d match the wall colour. At that point we mentioned to the body shop about our fuel filler problem and they said they could solve that for us. They were used to draining diesel fuel from tanks and storing it while a body repair was being done, so doing this for us was an easy task.

There’s lots of bashed up heavy trucks out there, so we had to wait a month for a spot to open up in the body shop. It would take two or three days to do the job. When repaired, they would match the powder coat brown colour and re-paint the tanks in a high quality automotive wet paint. We’ve discovered that the powder coating is too soft to stand up against scratches, and despite it being a polyester coating that was supposed to be UV stable, it tends to fade in the sunlight. So this change to automotive wet paint was an added bonus. It also makes touch-up easier in the future. Later this year we’ll have them repaint the brown storage boxes etc. on the sides of the truck so everything matches perfectly.

Total cost for the modifications… $3,200.00 CDN. ($2,400.00 US). Almost ten times the amount that it would have cost if the builder had done their job properly.