TVR Tasmin, Cracking On

Some goodies arrived during the week, so it was time to get under the Tasmin and rip out some hose.

Since working under cars on stands sucks, I had another go at getting the car up on the Quickjacks. This time I was much more successful. I had to use the jacks sideways (an approved method, and the same as I used on Snicket)

The reason I wasn’t so keen on this initially was that the exhaust hangs so low I wasn’t sure it would clear the frames. It did. Just.

With the Tasmin in the air, it was much easier to roll around under it on my creeper. I started to rip the old fuel hose from the tanks out. No photos of this process because it was messy….

First I disconnected the feed to the pump. This is from both of the tanks, so I had a 10L fuel can ready. I managed to spill a fair bit, but got it into the can in the end. I filled up with 10L the other day, and about 9L or so came out. Some of that difference would be on the ground (and my arms), but it confirms that the tanks were bone dry when I got the car.

The hose came out easy enough. It was worse than I thought though, every section of hose was seriously perished, with cracking all over it. The hose also smelt like fuel on the outside.

There were some nasty splits in the ends of the hoses from each tank too

Bend the hose, and it isn’t pretty

The new hose is Continental J30R7 5/8″ fuel hose. This is a low-pressure suction feed, so didn’t need to be a high-pressure hose, it just needed to be high quality.

The hose walls are thicker than the old Aeroflow 400 series hose.

The old Tee piece is made from a bunch of Aeroflow bits. In the interests of simplicity, I replaced it with a 5/8″ solid brass Tee

Old mate wasn’t too hot on cutting ends straight, so a couple of clamps were hanging over the edge. Not best practice.

The new Tee section

And installed into the car. The two tank outlets are very easy to access

And the Tee hangs above the drive shaft (and there is evidence that the old setup had been in contact with the driveshaft at some point!). The zip tie is there to hold it up and clear of the shaft.

The hose was routed slightly differently to simplify the route, and then cut to length and connected to the pump. The hose was zip-tied to the chassis in a couple of places to secure it, making sure not to pinch the hose as it had been

With the tanks connected I want to replace the fuel filter and inspect the accumulator. The whole lot (pump, filter and accumulator) are mounted on a plate above the chassis, in front of the LH side rear wheel. On the later 280i the filter is mounted in the engine bay. The black one is the accumulator, and the silver one is the filter. The pump is out of shot to the left (with hose removed).

This is the other side. Let me illustrate the fuel setup with some coloured arrows. Fuel comes into the pump from the tanks (orange), out of the pump and into the accumulator (blue), out of the accumulator and into the filter (yellow) and finally, once filtered, out of the filter and along hard lines to the fuel distributor in the engine bay (green).

These hoses weren’t too bad visually, but no point in leaving them there. One quick check for seeing if your accumulator is stuffed or not is to disconnect the vent hose from the back of it, and see if fuel comes out.

Mine was full of fuel. This vent hose should be dry, because it’s only to help equalise the air inside the accumulator, and shouldn’t have any fuel contact. The fuel is (usually) separated from that side of the accumulator by a diaphragm. If the diaphragm splits, it lets fuel through and back into the tank instead of holding pressure. My accumulator is stuffed.

Thankfully I had planned to remove it completely and will be using new fuel hose to bypass it and route the pump straight into the filter.

The fuel filter has banjo fittings on it. The inlet converts to rubber hose, whilst the outlet is to a hard line.

Some of the hose clamps on the fuel hoses had been installed by a scumbag and weren’t accessible from the underside. I’m not too sure how they were even done up, unless it was off as a complete assembly and clamped whilst on the bench before fitting. Since I wasn’t using the hose again I chopped it off, unbolted the accumulator and pump and removed the lot. The accumulator looks very old and probably original to the car.

The filter had been replaced, but it had a date of 2005 on it. The receipts say that the “recently replaced” filter was leaking back in 2011, so either it wasn’t that recent, or it was old stock when fitted.

I ordered a filter online based on the original filter numbers I had, and even with triple checking, it’s wrong.

Yeah, that’s not gonna fit. It’s possibly the correct filter for a later car with the filter in the engine bay. Working off the number on the filter, I need a Ryco Z399 instead. One has been ordered, along with a Z71 oil filter.

Unfortunately that leaves me at a standstill now. Hopefully the new filter will be here this week and I can fit it after work one day.

In the meantime I had ordered a new air filter, so went about fitting that. I had previously checked the filter and noted it was dirty, and the wrong filter. The old filter had rounded corners, so left an unfiltered gap at each corner.