I tacked, welded and dressed a reinforcement ring for the fuel pump. I think I really should have used a thicker piece, but since I’ll probably have to replace the whole bottom of tank anyway, we’ll see if this will work.

Using friction from the gasket to hold the bolts, it was a pretty simple matter to bolt it in place.

Of course, now that I think about it, it’s going to leak like a sieve unless I seal around the bolt heads. Even then, it will leak around the bolts between the tank and the reinforcing ring because the ring is only welded on the outside edge. Besides, there are probably pinholes in that weld.

Soooo… I guess I wasted an evening. Except that I just needed to do something with my hands.

I think I will need to get a 3 inch holesaw and a piece of 1/8″ or 3/16″ plate slightly smaller than the bottom of the tank. Cut the hole, drill for the fuel pump bolts, braze them from the inside for studs, secure the plate physically to the tank with a few bolts and braze around outside edge to seal it.

Somewhere in there, I need clean all the rust chips out of the tank out, too.

Drat.

Boost Engineering has essentially backordered the trigger wheel, citing a manufacturing problem that should be corrected shortly, hopefully by mid April. Since I don’t want to further delay running the engine, I will get it running with the 009 distributor and convert to EDIS later, though hopefully not much later!

In looking for something unrelated, I found a cache of missing parts, namely the bag-o-relays and relay sockets.

Once I get the fuel tank in order, I should be mere hours from trying to start the engine.