Fix High Altitude Vapor Lock

Hey guys it's John at JeepsterMan. Uh today we're in our CJ3B. We're on the Fall colors tour so we're at elevations, we're anywhere from like 8,000 ft all the way up to around 13-14,000 ft. So we're going to talk about vapor lock today. It's a real thing, um happens a lot in these flat fenders L-heads or F-heads. We saw it a lot on the trail yesterday. We're going to show you guys a couple tricks and things that we learned about the vapor lock. So always carry water with you because you usually with just some water quite easily and get rid of your vapor lock. You can see we've got a little bit of it right now, so I don't have any fuel- well, a little bit in my filter. But just a minute ago, you kind of see it's percolating it's boiling. And the higher you get an elevation, the lower the percolation point is for your fuel so it can start boiling. So with this clear bowl like we have on our fuel pump here, you can clearly see if you're getting fuel or not. Alright? And then you can see it, we have a sediment bowl and our fuel filter. But what we found, if you can see how close the outlet is here, the manifold, that was getting hot so what you want to do is just kind of pour some water around your fuel pump, around the fuel line there. And cool this thing off. You also want to keep in mind like if you keep your um keep your RPMs up you're less likely to get vapor lock. Another thing, you really don't want to run a fuel filter in between your fuel tank and your fuel pump. You need to run it in between your fuel pump and carburetor. If you run it in between between the fuel pump and the um fuel tank, it also lowers the point for uh percolation, increasing the risk of um vapor lock. People will usually have a fuel line down in here close to manifold. Same thing, you can pour some water on it if you think it's getting hot and Vapor locking so, just pouring water down there. Now that, typically the other thing- if you shut the vehicle off it's going to sit there and it's going to heat soak. So if you can keep the vehicle running, keep air flowing through it. Um, another little trick we learned- so we even like propped our hood open a little bit yesterday to get more air flow going through here. When we were trail riding we were still able to put the hood catches on. So you just want to like keep this as cool as possible, put water on it if you have to. And then another thing, so once you pour the water and cool off that fuel pump, check these other areas, you might have to pour water on those, we even packed ice around it. So carry a can of- you could use brake parts cleaner if you had to- but ether's really good. So once you get starting fluid worked through this and you cool that off you should be able to suck this full fuel through there and release that vapor lock. Um another trick you can do, and we're probably going to do this later on is we're going to put an electric fuel pump on a switch. So you can use an electric fuel pump to clear the line, to clear that vapor lock. So if you get vapor lock you could flip that switch on on your electric fuel pump, clear the vapor lock, you'd be good to go. So those are kind of some trips or tips and tricks that we learned um from some guys showing us all this stuff and really, you know we run a lot at lower elevations, higher speeds. We don't get a whole lot of vapor lock. But up in the mountains like this you're going to get it so, those are just ways to do it. You also, you know, we set the Daytona carburetor here, it's got an adjustable uh jet cuz you do need to adjust your jets. You need less fuel at higher altitude you're typically going to have to advance your timing and you're also going to have to reset your idle speed screws. So when you go up to these altitudes you need to bring a dwell tachometer and a timing light so we brought all those and set that when we first got here. So those were just some tips and um tricks. Carry water like I said, carry a cooler, bring ice cuz you can always pack ice around it and just cool your system down and then shoot some ether in it and you should clear that vapor lock. So thanks for watching.