Ariel.Club Forum

FourFather Eddie Hill's Viton gaskets are holding up fine, four years after installation, problem solved.

Eddie

Either run the car damn near out of gas OR siphon the fuel out....remove the filler neck completely, stick a camera in the hole and take pics of the filter screens....I did this and that's how I knew they were F'd......but it will also tell you if they are clean like Lane's..in which case I'd never pull the pump...what a pain in the BUTT

[quote="Hellooo Newman"]
For those of you who have changed out the fuel filler and fuel pump gaskets, were both the gaskets bad, deteriorating and contributing to the problem or was it only the filler gasket?
[/quote]

My filler gasket had started to break down.  Many large (pencil eraser size) chunks were in the tank but not a lot of small ones were.  My pump pickup screens weren't very dirty.

Conversely, my pump gasket was in pristine condition.

Echoing what Silver said. If the filler gasket is bad, you have to pull the pump, so you may as well replace the pump gasket.

both on mine but the fuel pump to a much lesser degree.

Here's the thing to consider

If your neck gasket has failed, YOU MUST pull your pump and replace the socks.

If you neck gasket has not failed and you replace it in time, then your socks are probably clean and I would NOT bother pulling the pump b/c it didn't really deteriorate like the neck side b/c it was not cut incorrectly.

On the neck side they cut only a hole big enough for the neck so it's like a large disc 4 inch diameter with a small hole cut out, when the tank is full the fuel pulls the excess gasket down and turns it into mush.

On the pump side the gasket is trimmed back far enough that it doesn't dip down into the fuel so this is really not such a problem.

If you never fill your gas tank up or never leave your car sitting with a full tank the deterioration will take much much longer to become a problem...whoops.

For those of you who have changed out the fuel filler and fuel pump gaskets, were both the gaskets bad, deteriorating and contributing to the problem or was it only the filler gasket?
I'm asking because changing out the filler gasket is much easier than the fuel pump gasket.

I put my fuel pump back in yesterday and found that Brammo used the same length screws for the pump flange as they did for my filler neck flange, even though the pump flange is a good bit thicker. The screws going thru the pump flange only engaged a few threads in the tank. So I swapped them out with slightly longer ones. Stripping out a threaded hole inside that tank flange would be a real pain in the Atom to repair.

I got a FS-216 strainer at O'Reily's Auto parts to put on the outside of the fuel pump bucket. It has a differant type of locking tab than the stock strainer. To make it seat all the way onto the port, I will have to rotate so the the sock portion is no longer trapped under the bucket and it will not not be locked into postion keeping it from rotating. Is this important that it be under the bucket? The strainer fits onto the port real tight so I would think there is not much chance any fuel sloshing around could free it up, so what else could the locking tab be for, especially since connection and port is still trapped under the bucket?

Today, I finally pulled the seat, drilled out the firewall, and moved all cables & wiring out of the way to get the fuel pump out. My lower strainer was not too black but it had lots of aluminum shavings stuck to the bottom of it as well as on the top of it where it is pinned to the bottom of the basket. Thanks Brammo again.

As I recently learned, it seems that it's not just Brammo that's incapable of specifying the correct gasket material... BMW is under fire as well for using oil/heat-incompatible Buna-N in gaskets for their variable valve control unit: http://beisansystems.com/

[quote="MadMaxAtom and company"]
^Not good news.   I was hoping brammo used the factory gasket on the pump module. I guess not.
[/quote]

The GM "factory gasket" is an O ring - the Aveo/Cobalt pump mounts very differently than the way it is used in an Atom.

^Not good news.   I was hoping brammo used the factory gasket on the pump module. I guess not.

A few months ago I replaced only the fuel filler tube gasket with a Viton gasket. I didn't replace the fuel pump gasket then in hope that it was not in as bad a shape, and wouldn't require me to replace it too. I don't believe that the pump gasket is as exposed to fuel as the filler gasket is,............. but, my pump gasket is now showing easy to see cracks at its' outside edges. I am going to take that to mean that it is probably worse on the inside edges that are exposed to fuel.

Thanks, I forgot about them, that's where I got my pump.. 

Got mine here:
http://www.autoperformanceengineering.c ... /kits.html

little ways down  $3