by HOLDEN RULES
The son and I contributed to the problem of peak, or declining, oil a couple of weeks ago.
We are fortunate in west Auckland to have a shop off Lincoln Rd, that, among other things, specialises in parts for old Holdens. The 20-year-old and I were down there on April 20 to buy a new top radiator hose and hose clips to fix a small coolant leak in the WB one tonner. While there, we inquired if they had a fuel tank for an HZ Kingswood.
They reckoned they might have several, and said they would phone us the next morning after they’d found them and brought them down for us to inspect.
Sure enough, the next morning they had three on the floor. Two looked identical, and looked suitable. But then I thought the filler neck on one looked marginally longer. When measured, it was.
After some discussion, we were advised to take the one with the shorter neck — with “HX” handwritten on it. “An HX fuel tank will be the same as an HZ,” we were told.
“How much,” we asked.
“It’d usually be $200 to $250,” the owner said, “but for you [meaning the son], $150.” He also threw in a catalogue — 20 pages or more — of all their HQ-series parts, many of them new.
The following Friday I got home from work and found that my young man had taken the HZ to a garage and got a quote of $80 to swap over the fuel tanks.
The son found out later that the mechanic who did the job struggled, finding that someone had in all likelihood narrowly escaped death by explosion, after also welding the tank in place.
Anyway, hallelujah, we now have an HZ we can fill with fuel.
“Have you had a look at the old tank,” I asked the son the morning after the installation. “No,” he said. “But I’m going to.”
Almost as soon as we opened the boot, where the old tank had been temporarily placed, we noted a hole in the top right of the old tank. And on the front left, just above the seam, were two — a big one about the size of a 10c piece, and another about 5mm across.
We took the old tank out of the boot, placed a muslin cloth over a funnel and drained as much fuel as we could into a petrol container.
“Where are we going to put the tank now?”
“How about leaning it up against the carport, behind the recycling bin?” I suggested. Hardly said, than done.
But wait, what’s that growing wetness on the concrete. It’s petrol pouring out.
So much for us thinking we’d got nearly all the petrol. Quite a bit was now pouring out of the holes by the seams.
By the time we’d seen it and acted, there was hardly any left — so we wasted fuel, and thus contributed to the problem of peak, or declining, oil.
— Holden Rules lives in west Auckland, a centre of Holden and V8 appreciation.