I recently had bit of an epic getting my car smogged in CA.

I've only recently started working on my car, so at the beginning of this I didn't know anything about the evaporative emissions system.

I essentially picked a random place to get my smog test. The place I ended up choosing was not good. During the evaporative emissions part of the test, the tech put his clamp on the old brittle nylon section of the hose!

Later I found a post by Art:

"...Hard to imagine the nylon failed for a canister line. But those short rubber transition pieces - I hope that is where the tester was "clamping" and not the nylon."

I found a very good post by Tatra Mike:
http://www.brickboard.com/RWD/index.htm?id=1283198
(unfortunately the photos have gone missing)

Between his post and the Bentley I was able to test the tank to make sure that it held pressure. Obviously I couldn't even make the needle blip when pumping air into the part of the line running forward.

Another post of Art's gave me the correct OD and ID for the nylon hose, which for the record are OD .25 inches and ID .17 inches. The auto parts store didn't have enough nylon hose for me to replace the whole line. So I replaced the forward section of line from the canister back to the firewall. This involved a lot of cleaning the ground with the back of my shirt. It was made harder by the fact that I don't own a jack or jack stands and that I'm working in the street.

My pressure gauge still claimed that the line wouldn't hold pressure. I could now pump the line up to 5 psi, but it would go right back down to zero. Looking at the line where it goes over the rear axle, I realized it was going to be a pita to replace that part. So despairing that I still had not fixed the system, I took it to a guy who I thought was a smog test and repair shop.

It turns out the guy was test only, but after some discussion he agreed to test my repair for free with the official test. And miracle of miracles, it passed. The CA pressure requirement for the line is only .5 psi to be held above .45 psi for a few minutes.

Maybe I wasn't clamping the line well enough (I only had a pair of visegrips) or maybe my repair just wouldn't hold the higher pressure I was giving it.

So I drove my car around to get it hot and took it back to the original test only place for my free retest. The guy wanted to clamp the replaced nylon line and I wouldn't let him. I tried to tell him where to clamp the line, but he wouldn't listen. Finally, he agreed to let *me* clamp the line where I wanted to, right up by the canister on the rubber part of the hose.

So I passed emissions.

Thanks Brickboard, Mike and Art!

-Spencer

PS The helpful test only guy claimed that you didn't even have to do an evap test on 240s, since the location of the charcoal canister is (1) not obvious and (2) not in some computer system containing canister locations. Can anyone in the know confirm or deny this claim?