Fuel lines - WARNING - check yours

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Fuel lines - WARNING - check yours

Steve145

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As a reminder to everyone, particularly those with older vehicles, it's important to check your fuel lines from time to time and replace any that are showing signs of deterioration.


I was working on my Uno today, started the engine to move the car out of the garage and noticed a slight smell of petrol.
Fortunately, I had the bonnet up, a quick look revealed that petrol was pouring from the line running from the fuel pump to the carb, which had split just after the pump.

So I spent the afternoon replacing ALL the flexible lines in the engine bay (I'll do the ones on the fuel tank at a later date).

I'd already planned to do this as part of giving the car a through overhaul, on a 30 year old car it's just good sense, but it wasn't what I had planned for this afternoon. Two weeks ago, when I brought the car home, there was no leak, two months ago, it had an MOT and the tester didn't spot the degraded lines.

So check yours, better to have to buy a metre of fuel pipe than to have to call the fire brigade...


Fuel1 shows the new lines and fuel filter.

Fuel2 shows how brittle one of the old pipes was after removal.

Fuel3 and Fuel4 show the split in the pipe that caused the leak.
 

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It's also important to change to ethanol ready hoses, and run ethanol FREE fuel afterwards...

I'm actually looking at rebuilding this to run on E85, with a higher compression ratio.

The shop couldn't tell me if the hose was ethanol safe or not, it'll all get replaced again before I get to that point though.
 
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