Date:         Tue, 11 Feb 97 17:45:45 EST
Sender:       Vanagon Mailing List <vanagon@vanagon.com>
From:         Sean Bartnik <sbart7kb@www.mwc.edu>
Subject:      Propane tank removal

Hey all,
Today I decided to finally remove the propane tank from my '81 Westy.
It's been cold and wet recently.  Today it was sunny and the ground
under my van was finally dry, so I set to it.

My tank has a leak in the on/off valve somewhere.  I couldn't get the
valve apart so I want to take the tank to an RV place and let them screw
with it.  

It turns out to not be too hard to drop the tank, but I was worried for
a while.  I took some pictures of the proceedings which I will one day
post to my web page.

The first thing I did was remove the rock guard from below the tank.
It's a metal plate that keeps the propane tank controls from getting
bashed.  It's held on by two 13mm bolts/nuts and came off easily.

Next I needed to disconnect the two lines that go from the tank to the
appliances in the car.  These proved trickier.  They were coated with
overspray from the PO paint job and so were painted closed, plus the
pipe gook they put on there during assembly didn't help.  The torque
required to turn these was enough that I was bending the copper lines
but not loosening the nuts any.  I was afraid of breaking the lines.
Luckily, I had a bright idea and used my other adjustable wrench to go
over the rectangular "union" piece.  It's a difficult piece to describe,
but it's a rectangular metal junction that splits the output from the
regulator into connections for the two copper lines.  I grabbed that
with my adjustable wrench to keep it from turning and then I was able to
loosen the union nuts with absolutely no problems.  

Once the copper lines were free, the tank was ready to come out.  BTW,
the tank was already emptied of all propane.  There are four nuts on
studs that hold the tank to the underside of the van, two on the
outboard side and two on the inboard side.  Bentley says to remove the
outboard ones and loosen the inboard ones and the tank will drop.
Bentley is sorta right in that you only have to remove two of the nuts
and loosen the other two but if you follow Bentley's instructions, the
tank will smash into the copper lines still hanging there on the way
down.  So I did the reverse.  I removed the two inboard nuts and
loosened the two outboard nuts.  The tank came right out and was a lot
lighter than I expected it to be.  

So this is an easy job, I imagine putting it back in will be more
difficult as I won't have gravity on my side then.  

Sean
--
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Sean Bartnik                           "Life is tough, 
sbart7kb@www.mwc.edu          but it's tougher if you're stupid."
'81 Vanagon Westy                      --John Wayne             

Fahrvergnugen means "push harder."

http://www.mwc.edu/~sbart7kb/myvan.htm
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