A couple of weeks ago I received the brass screen I ordered from McMaster-Carr. I needed to finish up the right tank’s fuel pickup, so I broke out the wire cutters, soldering iron and solder to fabricate a pickup screen.
This turned out to be a lot easier than I anticipated; the only trick was keeping the screen from unraveling while cutting and forming it. Running a bead of solder along one edge of the screen ‘locks’ the individual brass wires in place, making it easy to roll into a cylinder using a piece of 3/8″ aluminum tube as a mandrel. Solder the long side of the cylinder together with more solder, trim the excess screen away then close the end – and voila, a pickup screen.
Before somebody emails me, yes, I do know now that Van’s sells a pre-made fuel pickup with screen. But I already had the screen on order when I found out, so I decided to experiment – and it was easy to make an acceptable screen. I’ll probably continue to experiment with this over then next couple of days.
need help! where to buy brass screen and what size, I have to fabricate for a Ferrari pickup tube in the fuel tank. Sorry for the bother help needed thank you very much.
Greg,
I got my brass screen from McMaster-Carr (www.mcmaster.com), search for “brass wire cloth.” Unfortunately I don’t recall the mesh size I used, but I *think* it was 8×8 or perhaps a little finer.
Hope this helps –
Dave
That’s great! How did you mate the screen to the pickup tube? Epoxy it on?
For some reason I missed a bunch of comments made on the website…sorry for the extraordinarily late reply, Mike!
For anyone who has the same question, I drilled a hole through the tube near the end, slid the screen in place with some proseal, ran a piece of safety wire through the screen mesh and holes in the tube, then secured the ends of the safety wire. It was a bit of a belt-and-suspenders approach, to be sure.
HTH
Dave