Buy Cheap, Buy Twice

In chasing down the issues with my car, I want to plumb in a fuel pressure sensor. The easy way to do this is to add a 10mm brass tee piece in the hose that goes to the engine from the fuel pump, so off to Amazon I go and buy a couple for less than £6.

I get it all plumbed in and boot the car so that the system pressurises. Immediately, a thin jet of fuel at 4 bar pressure shoots across the engine bay to land on the exhaust manifold. At first I think it’s a fault with the hoses, but no, there is a small pin hole in the tee piece itself.

This chilled me rather. I was very lucky this defect was there from the start and didn’t happen after a few hours of driving when the engine was actually running and the exhaust hot. Because the system is pressurised, stopping the pump doesn’t stop the jet of petrol until the pressure in the rubber hoses has reached ambient.

So I did what I should have done in the first place and head off to Car Builder Solutions¹. A single tee piece cost me £7.39 and it arrived today.

Here is the original one I recieved from Amazon next to it.

It’s a hunk of metal. The Amazon one weighs 10g, the CBS one 35g. You can see the difference in the wall thickness here.

Never buy cheap from Amazon if you are dealing with high pressure fuel systems.