Booo! I had my first “is this going to get me home?” moment with the cruiser today: I started getting the “more throttle means less power” symptom after attempting to fill up at Tesco and finding they’d run out of Fuel. The problem was so acute when driving that I had to use low range to get up the hill near my house!
I’d heard of this kind of thing happening before on the Land Cruiser forums so the first guess was that the fuel pick-up filter was blocked. Out came the rear seats so that I could get to the fuel tank inspection port and within ten minutes or so the fuel pick-up assembly had been removed from the tank.
The pick-up was indeed blocked:
This is not good...
A blast with compressed air and some careful washing in diesel had most of the crap off, but before I reassembled the whole thing, I thought it would be worth checking the tank.
This is what I found upon peering into the aperture left by the pick-up assembly:
Dirty, dirty tank!
The main tank looked clean enough, but the sump in which the pick-up assembly lives looked more like a beach than something to do with a fuel system!
Pair of gloves donned, I had a bit of a fish around. The lump on the left was a gungy, gelatenous substance that wasn’t altogether unlike snot, while the sediment on the right appeared to be mainly ferrous. Indeed, fishing round with a magnet pulled a lot of it out, but also clouded the fuel in the pick-up sump. I decided to let it settle overnight.
Having slept on how I was going to clean this tank up, I remembered that I had a spare fuel pump knocking around. Mating this to some scrap pipe and an old auto box cooler line made an impromptu tank hoover:
This is why you should never throw anything away 
I used this to hoover the crap from the bottom of the tank and sacrificed about three litres of diesel in the process, but I figured it was worth it. This left the sump looking a deal better than it did:
Much better - vast majority of crap removed from pick-up sump
The pick-up was reinstalled and just to make sure everything was clean, I blew the feed and return fuel lines out with compressed air.
After this, I used the improvised tank vacuum again to pull another half-litre of fuel through the lines to make sure it was running clean, then changed the main fuel filter in the engine bay, reprimed the pump and took it for a test drive.
I’m pleased to report it’s all good and feeling a lot more pokey than it ever has done before. Obviously this was a job that had needed doing for some time…
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