FHC resto nr. 139; Fuel line

With the brake pipes and hoses fitted to the car it was time for the next and final pipe bending job. The fuel pipe(s) from the tank to the engine bay. I purchased a bespoke tool for this last year. And for the short pipe from tank to RH rear wheel well (PKC390) it worked perfectly, as these pictures show.

But for the more complex main pipe, the lack of a proper reference point on the tool proved the tool useless. Time for 2150mm off new 5/16” copper pipe and another cheap tool from the internet. This time I chose a similar tool as the (main) tool I used for shaping the brake pipes.

And with this tool (and its ability to use reference points) bending the main fuel pipe (PKC389) in its correct shape, turned out to be fairly easy. This was aided by a few original pipes which I could use as a template. But it was again rather time consuming!

With both the pipes finished it was time for their final stage, fitting them to the car. But before I could do that, I first had to fit the various plastic clips to the body, needed to support the pipe underneath the car. This turned out to be rather time consuming. Especially cleaning the anti-chip-coating from the small steel mounting heads for the clips along the sill (ZKC924) took me well over an hour!

But after that the clips still didn’t want to go over the heads properly. This time caused by the sharp edges of the clips digging into the thick anti-chip-coating. Luckily that was easily solved with a sharp pen-knife. This was used to chamfer the “front” edges of the clips a little, and thus preventing them from digging into the anti-chip-coating:

Final preparations consisted of slightly enlarging the mounting holes for some of the other pipe clips. And with that job done, it was time to fit the various clips to the car;

Rear bulk head

Sill

Cross over behind the passenger foot well

Left hand front chassis rail

And with all clips in place it was time for the moment of truth; fitting the fuel pipe itself. Didn’t start well, as one of the clips broke immediately. Luckily I have a few (second hand) spares. But the chosen replacement decided to break while fitting it to the car. Bugger! The second replacement went on without any problems. As did the pipe itself. It needed hardly any adjustments to get a decent fit!

On to the next job; checking and refurbishing the remaining wiring looms and fitting them to the car.