I came home yesterday to see a local TV news crew doing a live standup halfway down the block. After they finished, I asked what was up, and apparently fuel thieves hit the neighbors, draining one car and attempting to siphon from two more. Didn’t get into ours that we know of.
Now, I’ve had this model of combination-lock gas cap on my Pathfinder for years, and had one on a couple of other cars as well. They worked great (and the spare-key feature is pretty cool) until one day the combination lock stopped working. Granted, this was after about six years of service, but still! I ended up prying the damned thing off, which taught me two things:
1) the combination lock can fail; and
2) these caps are easily pried off.
I DO NOT RECOMMEND THESE CAPS!
I’ve been using the regular non-locking caps for most of our cars since then, but seems to me it’s time to go back. I’d prefer a combo lock, but I suppose a key-lock gas cap would work too. Any recommendations?
Of course, according to the TV reporter, the modus operandi of the local fuel thieves when they can’t siphon seems to be to drill out either your tank or the fuel-filler hose and let your fuel pour out into a bucket.
I suppose I can mount a steel plate to protect the fuel tank from a drill attack, but how about the hose? Anybody make drill-resistant steel wrap?
Buy a Pinto, according to Nader, as soon as they puncture the tank, it’ll explode.
Back when I was driving an MGB or Air-Cooled Bugs, I modified the fuel filler necks to allow the fuel to go to the tank but a hose was redirected by a wire screen to a separate 5 gallon can filled with something that SMELLED and looked like gas, but had enough solvents in it to eat a plastic gas can if left in it overnight and do a real number on flexible hoses and carburetor floats or fuel injectors or…
A friend with an SUV with a plastic cover over the bottom of his gas tank has glued a thick rubber sheet to the bottom of the fuel tank with a large piece of sheet metal glued to the rubber and the same thing to the top of the tank cover. These two plates are then charged by the battery when the vehicle is off through circuitry to around 50 K Volts as a very large air gap capacitor. If you were to try to drill through this, when you punched through the first plate and came in contact with the second plate it would not do good things for the drill, if it didn’t flat out weld the drill bit to the plates.
My Earth Fuckers have key locking gas caps on them. Lite has a racing style filler system, still bugs me not having a gas cap, but siphoning out of that thing would be a total bitch.
Which is why many are just drilling holes in the fuel tanks to steal the gas. I’m not surprised, it’s so easy to just get under and drill a hole in tank, especially on higher vehicles. Time for me to mount a steel plate over my gas tank.
Or you know, you could get rid 0f all that crap that’s in your garage and park the cars/trucks there.
Also to quote a character from The Unit “Headshots; they’re more sincere.”
You’re assuming Chris that everyone has a garage. I also don’t have a personal garage when staying at a hotel. Not to mention many people re-task their garage into something productive such as a wood shop when they don’t have an actual shop. You know with taxes and costs of living going up with unemployment, us hard working folk have to work harder to put the gas in the tank for our day jobs.