extremeodd
Active Member
- Local time
- 9:11 PM
- Joined
- Mar 30, 2019
- Messages
- 284
There are certain downsides to running a 1 gallon gas tank on a motorized bike that gets 100 miles per gallon when you only ride a few miles at a time. The biggest one seems to be forgetting to check your fuel level. If you're anything like me you've been riding down the street when all the sudden your bike starts to rev out of control, panic flows through you wondering what in the hell is going wrong, when out of nowhere the bike dies. An experienced motorized bike rider will immediately recognize that they ran out of fuel however people that are newer to the hobby or those who are just inattentive may think something catastrophic has happened. Then there's the whole fun of pedaling a heavy motorized bike all the way to the gas station or all the way home to where you have your fuel oil.
I'm sure many of you have had this problem and I'm willing to bet some of those who had the problem looked into a fuel gauge of some kind only to find that there isn't much available. Personally I spent about 5 hours researching various solutions to this problem. 99% of what I came across involved welding on a sight glass to the side of the tank. If this wasn't a $35 gas tank I would be down for doing that however I'm not willing to pay more than the tank is worth just to get a couple elbows welded in. Floats unfortunately don't seem to work all that well for our setup, and the only digital item I could find was around $200.
After a bit of thought I realized a sight glass could easily be installed without having to weld on the tank. If one were to put a barbed tee after the petcock and run a hose from it to the gas cap, you would have an effective sight glass for under $5. So that's exactly what I did!
Apologies for the not great picture, my main camera broke and Verizon keeps shipping my warranty phone to the wrong locations.
As you can see all I did was add an inkine barbed tee and ran a length of fuel line into a hole I drilled in the gas cap. It is not necessary to put the end of the line in the fuel cap however it was just the easiest solution to keep it from ever falling below the level of the fuel. As long as the end of the hose isn't sealed and is above the level of the fuel it can be put wherever. If you do the gas cap trick keep in mind when adding fuel you cannot let the gas cap dangle as gas will just pour out from it.
I'm sure many of you have had this problem and I'm willing to bet some of those who had the problem looked into a fuel gauge of some kind only to find that there isn't much available. Personally I spent about 5 hours researching various solutions to this problem. 99% of what I came across involved welding on a sight glass to the side of the tank. If this wasn't a $35 gas tank I would be down for doing that however I'm not willing to pay more than the tank is worth just to get a couple elbows welded in. Floats unfortunately don't seem to work all that well for our setup, and the only digital item I could find was around $200.
After a bit of thought I realized a sight glass could easily be installed without having to weld on the tank. If one were to put a barbed tee after the petcock and run a hose from it to the gas cap, you would have an effective sight glass for under $5. So that's exactly what I did!
Apologies for the not great picture, my main camera broke and Verizon keeps shipping my warranty phone to the wrong locations.
As you can see all I did was add an inkine barbed tee and ran a length of fuel line into a hole I drilled in the gas cap. It is not necessary to put the end of the line in the fuel cap however it was just the easiest solution to keep it from ever falling below the level of the fuel. As long as the end of the hose isn't sealed and is above the level of the fuel it can be put wherever. If you do the gas cap trick keep in mind when adding fuel you cannot let the gas cap dangle as gas will just pour out from it.
