greetings

re my '75 450SL, everytime I work under the hood I have to be real careful when nudging or moving any of the plastic tubes which carry vacuum throughout the engine compartment. heck, there's an almost 100% chance one will break if I attempt to move it aside to get to something else! So far I've been able to rejoin broken plastic sections with rubber tubing.

The plastic tubing has, over 25 years of heat in the engine compartment, become brittle and easy to break.

Does anyone in the forum know if it'd be ok to replace what plastic tubing I can reach with just regular rubber vacuum tubing? Or is there a particular reason why MB chose to use this thin plastic tubing, joined here and there by thicker rubber vacuum tubing?

Am talking basically of the plastic vacuum tubing that crosses over the engine itself where most of the heat is generated from both the engine and the catalytic converters which MB thoughtfully emplaced there.

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D. Chang
Network Integration Engineer
MCSE, CLP, CCNA