As these cars are now coming up on 10 years old and some are going to have done some miles, you might want to take preventative action on these god awful plastic boost/vacuum hoses.

As they've aged they've become extremely brittle, and snap clean in half if you so much as touch them.







Part numbers can be seen on the bags.

These hoses go from the outlet duct of the supercharger, to the fuel pressure sensor, and on to the vacuum pump in behind the headlight.

Also the connection at the outlet duct of the supercharger gets very hot, and the flared end of the plastic tube that goes into the rubber elbow also loses its grip. Mine blew out and left me with a considerable vacuum leak at idle, such turned into a boost leak when the bypass valve on the blower closed.

The brittle tubing broke in several places when trying to fix this leak.

They are pretty cheap so it's worth taking care of them if you're in there for other reasons.

Put some zip ties on the rubber joints while you're at it.

 

Is that part of the rat's nest of that thin pipe stuff that sits just above the supercharger snout? I managed to break one of mine whilst attempting to change the supercharger fluid a couple of years back, pretty much just by looking at it and wondering what it was.

I ended up bodging it with a zip tie which so far seems to be holding but always had it in mine to swap it out.

 

Yes that's where they are.

The brand new hoses were soft & flexible, the old ones extremely brittle.

 

Nice one, thanks - I'll order some up and change them out when I get round to doing the S/C oil, it'll make access easier anyways.

 

I've come across tubing issues in the past with similar plastic tubing. As an FYI what I used to do is replace the plastic with the flexible brake tubing. The coated tubing comes in different sizes and allows for the rubber fittings to be either secured with clamps or glue. You can either bend it using the OEM forms or bend it custom . Just a suggestion .

 

I salvaged the rubber ends and made up new tubes from unalloyed copper. Inexpensive and won't break again.

 

Hi, this sounds like a good solution as the spare parts I bought are dated 2010 so likely to break soon. What is the size (diameter) you used for the copper tubes?

 

Cambo - hopefully you still check this - when you had the loose hose /vac leak did it amplify the supercharger sound considerably? Also was it the hose in the video and should it be that loose? Thanks

 

That's a different hose to the ones I was talking about here, but that one in your video doesn't look good either!

 

thanks for the quick reply - think Ill get a smoke test done first so I can work out what's leaking.

When you said you had a vacuum leak noise when it fails I don't suppose its sounded like this (las 3rd of the video)?

Trying to pin this down...


cheers