The day after getting the car home from Dempsey disaster struck!
My fuel PSI gauge wasn't reading correctly, so I began troubleshooting. Connections to gauge and sensor seemed fine. With the car running, I traced the line out to the sensor. I was jostling the wire loom to see if maybe it had broken somewhere, and looking at the gauge through my windshield to see if anything changed. When I finally got to the sensor I gave it a light wiggle to see if there was something obviously wrong with its connection.
SNAP! You see, my sensor was hanging off of my fuel rail utilizing a 90 degree sweeping elbow. With almost no force, that elbow cracked off. My, still running, engine turned into a gasoline sprinkler. It. Went. Everywhere. After a moment of shock I rushed around and shut the car off.
It took so little effort to break that elbow that it was inevitably going to happen. Just a matter of when and where. If I would have hit a pot hole or nasty bump while driving I am sure it would have broken.. and that gasoline would have sprayed into a hot engine bay, and directly onto some very toasty headers. Car #2659 probably would have gone up in flames. I consider myself extremely fortunate here. This was straight off of a cold start. Nothing was hot or up to temp. The car was sitting inside my garage.
I got to looking up parts, and quickly ordered some AN4 replacement pieces from Amazon. They show up the next day, get installed, and... now the gauge gets no reading.
More digging.. Turns out my gauge needs to ground out on the sensor side. The original setup ground out through the engine itself. The parts I ordered had a handsome black coating that made them non-conductive. Look up raw aluminum parts, can't find exact matches, design a usable set from what is available, order, 2 days, install.. the gauge reads correctly!
Go to close my hood.. it can't.
My sensor now sticks further out, and contacts the support strut on the underside of the hood. It won't close, can't alter the sensor location with what I have.. god dammit.
More looking. Find a place in California that makes a custom raw aluminum female AN4 to female 1/8" NPT adapter. That eliminates a piece out of my setup, and shortens it back to its original overall length. Order, install, gauge works, hood closes, success.
As an additional boon, the new elbow is FAR chunkier than the last one. It is a hard 90 bend, which wouldn't flow as well as the sweep, but there is no flow here. Just pressure. I am also mildly pleased that the blue fittings are gone. They didn't match anything else.
I am now keeping an AN4 cap-end for the fuel rail in my glove box.. just in case.