I have a 72 dart that I am soon going to get painted. While doing the engine bay I would like to remove the unnecessary clutter and tidy things up a bit. My question is this. Do I need to leave the charcoal canister on the car? Or can I just remove it and about 15 foot of vacuum hoses? Or does it serve a useful purpose after 30 years?

Thanks for all your help.

Rick



rcovalt@innernet.net

It catches all the hydrocarbon (gasoline) vapors so we don't all have to breath them. (cough cough gasp ) The idea is that the charcoal adsorbs (NOT absorbs) the vapors and then when the engine is running the vapors are drawn into the engine and burned in the combustion chamber with the rest of the fuel. I leave mine hooked up and working. Does not hurt engine performance. This is one of the few emission control systems that does some good and does not hurt engine performance. Yes, some of those '72 systems had more hoses than the 75-76 systems on A-body cars.

cfield@ll.net

I would think twice about using the charcoal canister. Maybe with a fuel filter between it and the carb? I had one puke charcoal into the carb; it leaned out the mixture ( got excellent gas mileage but ran lousy ); before I found the problem it warped the exhaust manifold! This was on a 1986 pickup. One feature I liked was a vapor separator on the fuel filter with a return line to the tank.

K.C. Becker


kcbeckeratriley@networksplus.net

The one in my 1987 and 1979 trucks puked charcoal into the carb too. The problem is they laid the canister on the side and after lots of bumps and miles the charcoal leaks around the filter material inside the canister. (I disassembled one to see what was going on inside) The ones in my Valiant (which are mounted vertical) have never had this problem. I noticed that on 1988 and up trucks they made a new bracket to mount the canister vertical. I took the old canister from my 1975 Valiant and put it on one of my trucks and mounted it verticaly and so far no problem after several years. The other truck I added some plain old inline fuel filters between the canister and carb. So far so good, the filters catch the charcoal. Yes, I've seen Chrysler Corp service bulletins saying to add a filter between the canister and carb. Also in an older Mopar Performance parts catalog they used to have "carburetor protection filters" available to put in the line between canister and carb. The picture looked like plain old inline fuel filters.

cfield@ll.net