Motorway leak: I had to mend it and fast
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under full, but I had had fuel stolen before and gauges can easily go wrong so the first thing I did was to dip the tank with my wheelbrace bar just to make sure I at least had fuel.
The next steps were to take off the bonnet, open up the bleeder screws and manually operate the lift pump.
The fuel came in fits and starts punctuated by bubbles and spitting noises. -Drawing
said to myself and looking at my watch saw that already I had used almost 45 minutes of my self-imposed margin. . I was once taught that it was easier to see fuel coming out of a leak than it.is to see air going in.
Mentally I remembered that far-off day when, sent out to a breakdown of just the kind I had now, I'd spent several hours trying to find the air going in, only to be shown by the driver of a Light-Six Scammell -Who was passing and who definitely knew more than this raw apprentice did — how to pressurise the fuel line from his very advanced braking system and find the problem in seconds. Thanks to that man I knew exactly what to do. Out came my air line — adapted to fit the pressure system just like the one I had seen on the Scammell all those years before.
Next I disconnected the fuel line at the tank and plugged the end with a rolled piece of insulation tape. Then the supply side of the lift pump was disconnected and the end of the air line taped to it.
The other end of the air line connects to a valve on one of the air storage tanks and this done, pressure was applied to the line.
There is a pre-filter in the fuel line on this particular vehicle. It was some 4,500 miles since it has been changed and it had not been troublesome up to ,now. But, sure enough, with the pressure on, there was the tell-tale mist of fuel being sprayed out of my leak coming from around the body of the filter bowl.
Now I knew where the leak was, but it was a unit failure and I did not have a spare element.
I was now running late and if I was not to have a very irate customer waiting at Kidsgrove I had to do something fast. • • Temporarily, a pre-filter can be dispensed with so I disconnected the pipes from the filter body, cut a length of my air line and for,ced it over the two pipes.
A good binding-up job with insulation tape gave me a serviceable if not perfect fuel pick-up and after bleeding the system off we went to Kidsgrove We arrived only one and a half hours late.