1989 Ford F53 Fuel Pump Woes Damon Challenger

In this episode, I remove the fuel tank on my 1989 Ford F53 Damon Challenger motorhome chassis. The symptoms it was having was losing power after going up or down an incline. It seemed to happen when the tank was less than 3/4 full.
I found a lot of rust in the fuel pump plastic housing. I cleaned it out and reused the pump. The sticker says it was a 2011 model. To solve the issue of rust plugging up the sock on the pump, I created my own external pump to feed the Ford fuel pump plastic housing. I installed a pre filter to the external pump. I used a Wix 5/16 inline clear filter. The onboard generator was drawing it's fuel from the Ford fuel pump vent line. I decided not to do that, since that is just more chance to draw rust particles into the fuel pump canister through the check valve on the bottom. Instead I pump clean filtered fuel into that vent. This should eliminate the need for fuel to pass through the check valve on the bottom. I added a tap into the top of the tank dedicated for the generator.

On my first shakedown trip, I followed the same path that I did before and had the loss of power issues. The 460 V8 muscled its way up the hill with no hesitation. My Glowshift fuel pressure gage showed 30 to 40 psi the whole time. So I kept going to a near by city that had plenty of hills on the route. Not one single issue with power. When I got back home, the external filter had a lot of signs of rust in it already. The trip was about 50 miles there and back. I will need to carry a lot of Wix filters with me on a road trip, but it's cheaper than buying a new tank and an aftermarket fuel pump!

I hope this can help other people with the Ford F53 chassis. It is such a pain to drop this huge tank, and having a simple filter to change on the outside is a game changer for an aging tank.

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