Step 1. Draining old gasoline from the Project Arctic Cat ZR 600 tank

The picture you see on the title of this blog isn't the actual beginning...some work was performed before I decided to start this blog.   What you won't have the pleasure of is bearing witness to me pulling this machine out of the brush and lifting it on to the trailer myself.   No small feat as my aching back could have attested to.   Then came dumping the machine in to the garage.....and cleaning all the leaves and crud out from the machine....yes, crud, despite the machine having a tarp over it.   It's amazing what two years of sitting around can do for a machine.

Yes, two years at this current residence, a new home we had built out in the boonies....for 4 years before that it sat on a trailer at our old house, a bit better protected.   However it, and it's cousin, a 1995 Yahama Phazer, were dumped off so we could use the snowmobile trailer to move brush and rocks at the new house.

Anyway, I digress,  I cleaned out the crud, only to discover, to my chagrin, that there was still about 5 gallons of fuel in the machine!   Many of you know that gas begins to break down in just a matter of months....and we're talking 6 years with this tank, holy cow!   To my surprise though it wasn't a shivering glob of goo, but a somewhat varnish colored liquid.  At least that's what I could see when peering through the fuel filler neck with a maglite.   A quick check with a nice clean stick didn't bring up any goo either.  Must be I had put Sta-bil in before loading it on the trailer ( I go nuts with Sta-bil when storing gasoline equipment)  Good stuff!  Obviously the gas is not usable, but at least it wasn't all a blob.

I needed to get that old fuel out, so I went to my local department store and bought a $4 siphon hose.   Have you ever tried to siphon anything out with one of these?  Not easy!  The hose that goes in the tank kept curling on me.   So after much swearing and thought, I came up with this:  1/2 PVC water pipe cut to a length about 1 inche taller than the fuel opening.  This allowed me to stick the hose in the pipe, and then the pipe in to the tank, allowing the hose to reach the bottom of the tank. Added: 12/16/2009 - Picture of the siphon and pipe.