1995 cb 500 fuel tank

Hi, new to this forum. just bought above and the fuel tank is full of rust. would welcome advice on a fix or does anyone have one for sale in good nick please. 

not full proof, but i had an old vfr tank full of rust i jet washed it on full power, and it took off a lot of the rust (almost all of it tbh), 
then tipped in some paraffin and engine oil to remove the water!
then removed the oil with petrol, dumped out the petrol oil mess...
 then filled with fresh fuel and fitted an inline filter

burning_rubber wrote:not full proof, but i had an old vfr tank full of rust i jet washed it on full power, and it took off a lot of the rust (almost all of it tbh), 
then tipped in some paraffin and engine oil to remove the water!
then removed the oil with petrol, dumped out the petrol oil mess...
 then filled with fresh fuel and fitted an inline filter

There are many worse ideas than this.

You can also try lots of rattling around various things like nuts and bolts, bits of chain etc with some soapy water to knock the rust off but it is time consuming and a pain to get all of them out again (a strong magnet on a stick may help).

Once you've got the rust off in some way it's also a good idea not to leave it half-full if you can - if it's full with fuel it is harder (not impossible) for it to rust.  If you leave it empty it will rust.

thank you chaps. i used fish tank gravel and diesel to start with.  still rattling it about, but it seems to be working.  getting it out is a bit of a bugger though.

Wotcher,

Sadly, your rust issue will come back.
I had a similar problem;
jet washed out most of the nonsense
broke up the tough stuff with a handful of nuts and bolts
reverse electrolysed to give it a nice finish

most fuel today has a chunk of ethanol, varying between (5-10)% for the most part.
This potentially allows a trinary mixture of petrol, ethanol, and water.

This trinary mixture allows about 30,000ppm of water 
So, a 10L tank (say),therefore has 1L of ethanol.
This 1L ethanol (in petrol) will support 30mL of water.
(juggle your own tank size and pump E value accordingly)

It's the water that will promote the rust ('cos oxygen dissolves nicely in water).
So, this example will have 30mL water in intimate contact with the tank walls for the duration.
nasty, especially if you've 'laid up' with a full tank.

I made a funky little moisture trap using a brazed stainless mesh cage containing a 3Angstrom molecular sieve.
Every now and then I take the trap out and regenerate at 200oC.

This was 8 years ago, tank is still super-bright inside

(Qualifications? : post-graduate research chemist, with 20+ active years as a research chemist)