I remember in high school — a ‘few’ years ago — we used to play rally car driver out on the gravel roads passing through “hill and dale” wheat field land around here. Never mind we didn’t know exactly what “rally car driver” meant, but we faked it anyway. There were lots of dips and rises, some you could get air over (we called it ‘flying’). Well, you can guess where this is going — I got some big air — bottomed the suspension — and the gas tank predictably got ground into the gravel. This was a ‘67 Chev Impala powered by 396 - 325 HP as it was generously measured then. The tank must have had a pretty respectable gauge of steel as there was only one small puncture. Trailing a small stream of leaded gasoline we made it back home — about 20 miles — just as the needle hit “E”. We fixed the hole with a screw and didn’t tell our parents. The screw held for the life of the car (with us anyway, should have kept it). The car salesman wanted to sell my dad the 427 version but it is a good thing we didn’t have access to that.
I had a similar experience with a “fix” like that. A colleague and I were working in a mill in eastern Oregon back in the early 70s. When we left the mill, we took a back road, all gravel, across the high desert west toward the Cascades. We were both in our company cars. We were bombing along this dirt/gravel road at about 70 mph when my friend noticed his gas gauge was going down. We stopped and found a rock had punctured his gas tank. It was a slow, steady stream, but we were probably 100 miles from the nearest gas station.
I’d read sometime before that that you can use a bar of regular bath soap to plug gasoline leaks. It swells and turns hard. So we tried that and, sure enough, it stopped the leak.
We parted ways. The next time I ran into him a couple years later I asked if he had ever fixed his gas tank. He said “No, the soap ‘patch’ is still there!” In those days, we got new company cars every couple years and he turned it back in with the soap plug still on the tank. LOL. I always wonder how many years that car had that soap plug and if the person who bought it found the plug.