I wanted to tidy up a few loose ends and one of them is the crankcase breather tube. The routing was pretty straightforward, but I ran into a snag early on. The breather tube has an OD of 1 inch and the tube has a ID of 1 inch. Good? Nope. The tube wouldn’t fit over the Lycoming breather tube fitting for a couple of reasons. First, the hex lip on the end of the tube is bigger than 1 inch. Second, the tubing has ZERO give. What to do? One option is to remove part of the spiral metal former and see if it fits. The tube is double-wall, i.e. the metal spring is encased in orange silicone on the inside as well as the outside. That would make a tremendous mess of the tube if I ripped out the internal spring. Option B is to remove the breather tube and replace it with a smaller diameter one. That I really didn’t like. The breather tube is basically stuck. It came from DIVCO with the tube installed and when I put a wrench on it, it didn’t budge. Not wanting to go further and possibly screwing up the accessory case I thought about it…a lot. I reasoned that the white string on the outside is holding the internal spring back, so if I removed some of the string it may expand a bit on its own. Turns out I was right! I removed part of the string and the metal spring expanded enough so it slipped over the breather tube just fine. One worm drive clamp installed and I was back in business.
