I took delivery of my custom-made flexible Teflon fuel lines today, so this evening's work was to get them installed. The first thing I did was to clean the lines thoroughly with solvent and lots of high-presure air.
An initial test-fitting indicated that there would be some rubbing on one of the gear tower holes, so I enlarged the hole a bit. Everything looked good as I installed the lines, but after tightening everything down, another slight issue cropped up with another hole, so I had to remove everything (including the fuel selector and the fuel filter) and grind a bit more clearance. The third time was the charm.
One of the flex lines ended up being pretty close to the aluminum hard-line from the fuel filter to the boost pump (see photo #2), so I zip-tied a length of protective vinyl tubing to the aluminum line. I'll keep an eye on this area after the plane is flying to make sure there's no rubbing going on.
The final pair of fuel lines have turned out to be quite a bit more of a project than I'd expected, and it's really nice to have them installed once and for all... even if I did cheat and use flexible hoses.
New Teflon-lined racecar-quality hoses, made by a friend of mine who does this for a living. Sort of.
The middle hard line is covered with a length of tubing to prevent rubbing where the spacing is tight.
I'm pretty happy with the way the fuel lines came out.
