Fuel pipe type

[William2]

I am rebuilding an Elan and was wondering whether it was better to use 5/16" Kunifer pipe for the long chassis run instead of the black plastic type? Another reason being that Ethanol in fuel can attack some pipe materials.

[billwill]

See mine and others ramblings on that subject starting here:

lotus-elan-f19/getting-ogu-roadworthy-again-t26101-75.html#p176189

Modern cars seem to use nylon pipe, with multi-cone fittings which require a quite high force to push them into the pipe. Some of the fittings then have a quick disconnect capability with bayonet type clip-ins.

[mbell]

From what I've seen the original plastic tube copes fine with modern (ethonal) fuels. The problem is that it can get a bit brittle with age so it is more at risk major failure. If you have the body of it is probably wise to replace it, plastic or Kunife are used by most people.

It is normally the rubber hoses that suffer more from ethonal. I am in the US so I have purchased SAE 30R9 hose (teflon lined) for my engine bay runs. Any lower grade can have problems with ethanol. I am going to make up my own feeds to the carbs using this hose, rather than off the shelf steel braided hoses. I've also placing it inside heat shielding.

As your in the UK your not going to get much ethanol in your fuel so it is much less of an issue.

[billwill]

Ah, not so, we are also getting quite a lot of Ethanol in our unleaded petrol in the UK

Apparently there is less or none in Premium grade petrol, so last week I had to roam around to find a fuel station with a Premium 97 pump, because Tesco had run out of Premium.

[mbell]

I stand corrected. I hadn't realised that, thanks. It's quite bad they can sell E5 with out having to label it and heading to E10 soon. Have to run E10 here in my daily driver, it hasn't destroyed anything yet but sure it would run a lot better on proper petrol.

If you getting E10 I would be very careful with the steel braided carb hoses. I think most of them won't handle E10 that well.

[billwill]

There's an additive available which claims to cancel the rubber-eating effect of the Ethanol.

I haven't used or tried it yet.

Search for Ethanol additive