You might think that a car that suffered a major engine fire 2 years ago would have had its fuel system pretty thoroughly checked and replaced. Hmmm, not so. An occasional whiff of petrol was turning into a more frequent thing. After several checks it seemed there was an occasional leak from the pipe going from the float chamber to the jet on the left hand SU carb. Fiddling soon turned that into a flood over the left hand manifold. So a repair kit was ordered from Burlen, and yet again what I thought would be a quick job became more involved as it’s impossible to get to the jet pipe without removing the carb and associated linkages, and one of the carb bolts is well obscured.

After a bit more fiddling I managed to get the carb off and remove the offending jet pipe. The rubber o-ring at the float chamber end disintegrated in bits, and it looks like the pipe had been glued in – certainly there’s something on the end of it that means it’s unlikely to ever seal properly.

It never fails to surprise me how people are happy to bodge things that are so important. Proper sealing of the petrol circuit, especially where it's sitting above a hot engine, is about as important as anything else I can think of, so gluing a fuel pipe is just inexplicable.

Anyway, enough ranting, here's the shiny new jet pipe installed:

There’s a knack to getting the pipe to seal properly, but there are numerous handy videos on YouTube. Here’s the best one i could find:

You need to put the nut, washer and o-ring on the pipe in the correct order, and prevent the spring covering the pipe pushing the o-ring to the end of the pipe before you compress it with the nut. Not difficult, but vital to get right.

Here’s the old jet pipe with a hard residue on the end which means it will never seal well:

A few weeks later, and more petrol smells. Another session of poking around unearthed that fact that the fuel filter, after the electric fuel pump, had also been bodged. Brass olives on an old plastic fuel filter may seal well when new, but old olives won’t work. That’s what had been fitted, together with an unholy mash-up of old pipes and fitting that looked more Victorian than Mid-Century:

So, an order for some decent 8mm fuel pipe, jubilee clips and a metal filter meant I replaced this with a better setup. I had to make a new bracket, and it isn’t completely standard, but the result is good and doesn’t leak - I plan on replacing all of the fuel system and re-building the carbs due to all these leaks, so I'll do a proper job in a few months.