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Suddenly - a fuel leak! (longish)
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Posted by MS (more from MS) on Tue, 10 Jul 2001 01:32:01 Share Post by Email
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The subject could also be: Just another day at work fixing my car.

I live adjacent to where I work part of the day, so I often have ready access to all my tools in the event I'll need to work on the car (or I just get bored). I had a slate full of things to do at work and got a good start. Then I skipped out to move my car away from the hot sun. Sitting there at warm-up idle, I suddenly caught a whiff of gasoline. Uh oh, this can't be good. I left it running and took a look around. Nothing beneath the hood. Looking under the car from behind near the gas tank revealed a steady drip of gas. Damn! So how long has this been going on?! Had the breeze not been moving toward me, I might not have even smelled it to begin with!

Clearly, this was one repair that couldn't wait, work be damned! So out come the ramps and up goes the car. Off go the day clothes and on come the repair clothes. I lay down a sheet of cardboard and angrily crawl under with a flashlight. With the engine off there was no leak, but when running, there was a drip in the general vacinity of where several lines run into the car body, way up past the muffler. So out comes the cleaning rag. Nice grease and dirt smears begin covering my arms from rubbing up against the axle and coil spring. Great, just what I needed on a monday - filthy hands and arms. With the area now free of grime, and with the aid of a flashlight I could see where the drip was forming - just outside a small cylindrical fitting of some sort where two rubber tubes were pressure fit with screw clamps on each side of it. I cleaned some more and could see that the fitting had an stamped arrow pointing toward the gas tank. I guessed that is the return line, and the fitting is some sort of check valve.

The leak was evidently coming from the engine side of the valve along the clamp. I reasoned that the aging rubber tubing, under the pressure of the clamp, had dried and cracked enough to form a leak. A rubber hose attachment with a leak is rather easy to fix - you simply cut the bad part off, refit and reclamp. But this repair was gonna be tricky because there was maybe an inch and a quarter of rubber and then a compression fitting that connected to a rigid plastic line. How much would I have to cut and would there be any left over to reclamp?

It took me quite a while to find the best way to get up there with a small screwdriver to undo the clamp. After the clamp was undone, the rubber tube and valve wouldn't part - stuck together. They wouldn't even turn loose. Great, so now I'll have to get rough with it. I imagined the rubber hose and plastic fitting had welded together, aided by nearly 20 years of gasoline and diamond forming pressure. So even if I did cut the hose at the end of the nipple, I'd still have a mess to clean around the nipple in order to create a smooth leak free fit. Would I even be able to do so? What if it cracks apart? Then I can't even drive to get a replacement part.

With months of regular repairs already on this car, saving it from the grave at that, this was but one more challenge. Clearly I could have driven with that leak for some time (bad for gas mileage), but I was determined to fix it right there and then! So with a razor blade I began cutting into the hose lengthwise along the nipple. My thinking was to weaken it enough to perhaps pull it off. Several minutes later, twist and pull, and still nothing. OK, enough of the nice stuff. I began sawing across and just at the end of the nipple. It was coming off! No sooner did I cut a good way when gas started spraying everywhere. A gasoline shower for me, great! I ran to get a bucket, then stood there watching as a steady stream of gas flowed out. On and on it poured while I thought through the physics. What exactly is this line and how do I stop it? The tank wasn't full, so it wasn't a gravity leak. There's obviously pressure feeding this line. But from where? Disconnect some lines at the fuel distributor? Or just...

unscrew the gas tank filler cap and let the pressure out. Voila, no more gas shower. Clealy, my dumb mechanic move of the week. And I had to wait a bit for the spilled gas to evaporate.

While I waited I decided to replace the currently in place cracked plastic filler cap unit with a good used one I found some weeks ago. I'd replaced one on my previous 900. Not all that difficult a task, but the hard part this time was clearing my trunk of all the miscellaneous parts and tools and general trunk stuff just to get at the fitting from inside the trunk! A good 30 minutes later and that repair was done. And I also found the extra radiator hose thermo fitting that had been missing.

Now back under the patient, I continued cutting until the hose was free from the valve fitting. From this point forward the repair went smoothly. I managed to cleanly cut off the remaining suspect tubing from the valve nipple, then with just enough good rubber tubing left over I rejoined the two pieces and secured it. And no more gas leak.

What could possibly be next? I can't wait to find out.
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