'72 Westy Fuel Pump Jackhammer Sound

[BumbleBus]

Hi. Noob so go easy on me.

'72 Westy trying to bring back to life. Single carb.. lots of PO craziness of course. First thing was to try and get her to turn over. After a lot of hand holding she would start, but die. Was getting this sound from the fuel pump on single ignition turn.. not trying to actually start the bus yet.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zoToz4Q8QxY

Thought for sure it was a bad pump so I bought a new one and replaced all the fuel hoses at the same time and moved the inline fuel filter behind the fire wall as I've read is good. So... now the bus.. she starts and she runs! Drove around the block etc. Life is good! BUT... I'm still getting the fuel pump jackhammer sound from the brand new fuel pump albeit much, much quieter. So.. what is this noob missing or is that a normal sound, which I would find hard to believe. Thanks!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W9NZwlKNrzY

[Westy78]

I'm not positive but that may be normal for that kind of electric pump. It does sound like it's cavitating though. I do know that the stock electric pumps in the later fuel injected engines run almost silent. I would try and isolate the pump from the body with some rubber dampers. The noise is being amplified through the sheet metal.

[Gypsie]

How is the pump attached? Are there already rubber dampers on the mounting hardware?

Sounds like amplified pump noise but is it coming from the mount or the tin it's attached to?


Can you make the sound go away by holding pressure on any of the components in the area?

[BumbleBus]

Thanks for the replies! I will try to get some rubber dampers on there and see if that takes care of it. It is indeed mounted straight to the metal with two bolts so makes sense it's being amplified. I just wanted to make sure that the noise was "normal". I'll search around for cavitating and read up on that too so I'm edumacated on that. I notice now that the new pump is "weeping" gas too on the outflow side... wondering if I torqued the nipple on there too hard... there was so much thread left I thought something was wrong until I noticed the old pump was the same with lots of nipple thread exposed. One thing at a time.

PS - Loving this place BTW. I tried getting an answer to this on the samba and that's a strange place. As a new user you're terrified to post anything new because you'll get you head chewed off, "use the search dumbass" or "you don't deserve a bus" etc., but then you find an old related thread and post to that and just get ignored. Haha... catch 22 to me. So thanks for this place!!