O.K., I know this is a Corvette Tech. site, but I also have a '57 Bel Air with a fuel problem. I noticed last night after driving, (hot night) that my fuel filter bowl was only half full. The car does stumble off the line a little. (I thought it was an accelerator pump problem.) What would cause the fuel bowl to be like this? Vapor lock? Weak fuel pump? Heat riser stuck close? Vent in gas tank, cap? Any insight to this problem would be helpful. Thanks Ken
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Re: Vapor Lock, Fuel Filter bowl half empty.
It's just trapped air if the filter is laying on it's side and shouldn't have a major effect on performance.
Face it, if you were pulling enough fuel to suck in the air and make your power plant stumble, then there would eventually be no air showing in the filter.
More importantly, if you purge the filter and continue to get air into the filter, you had better be checking everything before the fuel pump pronto!
I would tend to agree with your accelerator pump or other issues such as timing, vacuum advance and the like for the stumble.
Just my best guess.
Chuck -
Re: Vapor Lock, Fuel Filter bowl half empty.
we found out that under race conditions you must always mount a inlne gas filter in the vertical position to prevent the carb from seeing pockets of air. the inlne filter will stay full when mounted in the vertical positionComment
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I'll post a little egg on my face
Back in high school a buddy & I were off-roading in his Land Rover when all of a sudden the engine died. I looked at the glass fuel filter bowl and saw that it was filled solid. I commented how I thought it looked like this one was different looking than any others that I had seen, and surmmized that it had a bowl-fitting sintered bronze element. Anyway, I took it apart since we were not getting fuel at the carb and I realized it was packed completely with rust. We had jarred a bunch of rust loose from the gas tank bouncing over the hills.Comment
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Re: I'll post a little egg on my face
Don't feel bad. My first SCCA experience was on a Triumph TR3. The first day at the track for testing, we discovered that there must be 100 lbs of rust in the tank, that we removed about 2 ounces at a time with the sediment bowl. The tank was trapped inside the rear braces of the roll bar and couldn't be removed, and we had carefully flushed it and vacuumed it out earlier and thought we were fine.
The driver would go out, make it to turn 3 at MAR, coast to side, dump the sediment bowl, head on to turn 6, coast down to 7, dump the bowl, make it to 10, dump the bowl, and make it back to the pits.
After a few laps, we figured how to drive the gas line up into the tank a couple of inches higher to keep the rust on the bottom from getting in it. There was about 4 gallons of gas we could never use, but it kept the rust out for as long as we had the car.
A year or so later he rolled the car, and some helpful individual thought the cap was leaking, so they "tightened" it. You guessed it, they dumped the tank right there. No fire, but we finally got rid of the rust. That rust stain stayed there for several years.Comment
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