Gas Tank Dent

So I was driving home to CO on Friday, and seemingly ran outta fuel in the middle of I-80 through Wyoming. After getting home it was found out I have about a 3" dent in my gas tank. My fuel gauge stops registering around a 1/4 tank (thus why I ran out of fuel, no empty light since the truck thinks it's always at at least 1/4 tank). I guess the tent is right where the sensor is... Any ideas on how to fix this? My capacity hasn't been hurt at it, would just be nice to have the gauge be reliable in the region that actually matters.

Was thinking I could yank it and either use compressed air or water to try and push the dent out. Is there a way I could reposition the sensor so that it's not sitting on the dent? Otherwise I'll just snoop around for a new tank, but since nothing's really wrong with the current one...



And fun story: I finished finals on Thursday but couldn't drive home because my brake pads were gone and had eaten up one of my rotors, so I didn't leave until Friday at 5pm. Then ran out of gas around 9pm and stayed in a hotel after waiting three hours to get towed. Then I get home and start tearing the truck down to do mods/fixes for the summer: my front bushings on my sway bar are all but dead and my rear sway bar got yanked out of of the left bushing (the bushing is totally gone) and is stuck on some bracket in the back. My gas tank has the dent of course, and my front bash plate hit something sharp enough that I have a couple inch cut clear through the plate, along with one of the supports being buckled over a half inch. I don't even know when I did all this is the sad part. Guess I just have to upgrade

I'm confused - where's the dent? Unless it's pushed the pickup above the base of the tank it shouldn't affect your capacity or your fuel light.

If you can get to the dent real easy through the fill neck hole or fuel pump hole you could try pounding it out, but that could be a righteous PITA. You could grab another new or used tank, OR you could use this as an opportunity to visit a fabricator and have them make you an extended capacity tank. That's what I'd do.

I would replace the tank - no easy way to get that dent out, unless you drill a hole, pull it out and then patch the hole.

So we had bought a new tank for from some guys on Craigslist, thing looked almost literally brand new. We pulled the stock tank, and it turned out they weren't the same. I have pictures of the two, but the internet is slow as hell. The one we got had a 3 written on it, and the stock one had a 0 on it. The guy said the new tank was from an 01, but the stock one had a 3-4 more hoses coming off of it.

So we just bent the old tank back out, all we really wanted was the fuel gauge to be accurate again, and fixed it we did





With some help from the tractor

Good to hear!