A common complaint among VW owners is a smell of gasoline in the cabin, especially immediately after refueling. A few suggestions, some gleaned from the RAMVA Newsgroup, are given here.
A post from the RAMVA Newsgroup -
Take your fingers and rub the lines that are under the hood. If you can smell gas on your fingers then those lines are bad and need to be replaced. It's usually the vent lines that are near the filler neck.
Rob suggested -
Look for a clear plastic breather line behind the tank -- if yours has one, these do go brittle and can crack. The rubber fuel breath lines seem to last a long time, but where they connect to the tank (and box shaped canister near the tank if yours has one) can get damaged. Also look for wet spots immediately after filling around the main rubber connection on the filler spout--not likely, but possible.
One of the breathers on the tank is on the left side (has the clear plastic pipe on it in my car but will probably be a little different on yours), and this could have been damaged/come loose.
Dave's '73 SB suffered from this problem. Dave finally pulled the tank and replaced all of the rubber fittings and hoses. The outermost fitting on the filler tube was the most likely culprit, as it was badly cracked and heavy gasoline stains were found directly beneath it on the body of the car below the gas tank. Also, were are two wide rubber gaskets on the filler tube at the connection point -- Dave made replacements from an old bicycle inner tube. Replacing all of this rubber solved the problem with gasoline smell in the cabin.
Disclaimer stuff: Rob and Dave have prepared this information from their own experiences. We have not assumed any specialised mechanical knowledge, but we DO assume that anyone using this information has at least some basic mechanical ability.
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Last revised 6 May 2004.
