Gas theft prevention

Theves drilled my gas tank.
How do I prevent it from happening again? (Already moved parking location)
Is there a gaurd I can get installed?
Thanks in advance for any help.

 

i dunno, doesn't seem like theres much you can do if someone is willing to drill aside from keeping the truck in a more secure location. even a steel skid plate wouldn't offer much resistance to someone with a drill. people suck

edit: also, that's a rough first post. but welcome to TW anyway!

 

something like this: https://www.bayareametalfab.com/2005-2023-Toyota-Tacoma-Gas-Tank-Skid-_p_146.html

other fabricators make them too

 

Crazy someone would want to steal like thirty bucks in fuel that bad

 

Pretty hard problem. Very large area to try to protect. 1/4" AR500 (hardened) steel would discourage the casual driller but probably cost about $1,000 in materials + fabrication costs, plus adding 25-30 lbs of weight.

I'm trying to think what I would do if I had no alternative parking location. The only thing that comes to mind is coating the entire bottom half of tank with some kind of gummy epoxy putty that could be embedded with a mix of steel + kevlar wires & threads, to try to jam up a drill bit. With a layer of ceramic floor tiles under that.

 

Skid plates really only protect from the bottom, still pretty easy to get at it from the side
Garage is about it

 

Actually, if there was a way to securely glue 1/4" thick ceramic floor tiles to the tank, that alone would slow down a casual driller. Ceramic is impossible to drill with any normal drill bit. But the problem would be how to get the tiles really permanently bonded to either the bottom of the tank, or the bottom of the plastic tank skid-guard. Polyethylene is pretty hard to bond anything to.

Wouldn't be good to be occasionally shedding ceramic tiles, no matter how small, out from under the truck at highway speeds.

 

They had fuel thief’s in mad max. What was their solution?

 

Have a good insurance company. There’s nothing you can do, even with a steel skid plate, they will drilled through it if they want it that bad.

 

Scum of the earth

 

Man, I would be afraid of the drill motor igniting the fuel as it just started to drip from the tank onto the drill. Gotta be really desperate to do something like this, and it’s not like they’re going to sell it. It probably when into their car.

 

Nothing you can do really,too bad you don't have a garage.

 

This will take longer to drill, but costs more than 30 tanks of gas... https://exitoffroad.com/product/toyota-tacoma-long-range-replacement-fuel-tank-32gal/