Quote:
Originally Posted by vwnate1
I'm amazed no one has offered up a set ~ I know many here have old junk engines and so on, this is why I kept assembled dead units when I had my indie shop way back when ~ no need to wait a few days for that special bolt or washer from the dealer if you have some old engine / tranny / carby / etc. to scavenge parts off of...
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I really need a rural estate so I can park dead rigs in back. I love getting an oddball bolt from the junkyard that is exactly what I need.
Oh well, if all you had was one back-up set I could see wanting to hang onto them. So I fabbed my own. I was right, it took a while but one hopes this will avoid a scene out on the road someday where I discover a small and growing puddle of fuel under the car.
I've had some large aluminum scrap for some time, have been whittling on it for years. It's about 3/16ths thick, was part of some mounting bracket for God knows what that I found discarded. At first I decided to keep a curved part on the edge each piece, adding some geometric strength but then I realized it was needless overkill. Holding them with vice grips to trim them in the table saw worked nicely. I do get the galvanic corrosion thing, I've seen it more than a few times where some hack wanna-be plumber attached copper fittings directly to galvy pipe.
But I still wanted to use the alum - quick and easy to work. I had some remnants of flat gasket material - a hard rubber about 1/16 thick. Also have some 1/8 thick but I went with the thinner stuff. I attached some of it to one face of the alum pieces with contact cement. Used 1/4 bolts with the nylon bushing lock nuts to attach it. Speaking of over-kill, I even used thin nylon washers at each end of the bolt/nut to separate from the alum. The zinc plating alone was probably enough but the washers were really cheap.
One reason I liked the rubber dielectric face was the fuel lines would bear into it a bit, ideally preventing drifting around. The stock items have little curved bits for that, my approach is easier as a little bit of clamping pressure from the bolts will custom make channels to grip the fuel line.
No idea how bad it might be to have alum bearing directly on the steel injector lines but really no upside in finding out.
At first I made all of them as large as the ones up in the top range of the pic but then made some of them smaller when I realized I needed the room. Also, some portions of these lines are nicely parallel to their neighbors, others not so much, and then they might look parallel from above but be in a different plane. A large flat square might put unwanted pressure on the fittings by pushing or pulling while trying to make the lines equal lattitude. We can see how skinny the stock items are, perhaps with an eye to that issue.
