So I just completed teardown of a z3 steering rack. No issues so far but a question has come up. When I removed the rack hard lines (aka crossover lines) the special plastic little seal thingies that seal the lines to the body didn't look too good, and may have been a source of leakage as visually it seemed that way. I won't call them o rings because they aren't a normal o ring.
In the first picture you can see pieces of the seal caught up in the fitting.
Here in the 2nd picture you can see how ugly it looks. By the way, the other 3 don't look trustable either.
I cannot find the technical name for such a type of seal, and have never seen one before like this. It's made of semi soft plastic. I have been unable to find an example of similar seals either, in my hunt to identify this seal type.
I purchased the same edelmann seal kit that everyone uses for these racks. Included were 4 small o rings that would have to be for this (I assume as they're way too small for anything else...and there's 4 of them), but they are regular style rubber. I am not sure if the kit was designed:
--to fully replace the plastic seals (this option doesn't seem right, I wil elaborate below...)
OR
--the included o rings fit inside of these plastic seals, making the plastics act as an o-ring locater. They do nestle into the plastics pretty nicely, but that doesn't mean they're supposed to get installed that way. From the factory there were only the plastics.
The reason I assume the included o rings aren't supposed to simply replace the plastic is because there is a gap around the OD of the orings when placed into the rack ports. Seems like tightening them as tight as the fittings were during disassembly would rip them up.
That is what got me thinking, perhaps they are super hard to source/make etc so as a workaround the o rings are supposed to simply get located by the original plastics. Then when tightening the o ring just gets sandwiched by the end of the tube to rack port and its outward squeeze/stretch is stopped by the plastics. If you look at the pic of the fitting again, the new o rings do seem to closer match the diameter of the end of the tube than they do the bottom of the ports.
Does anyone know where to find original seals or their name, or how the supplied o rings get used? What kind of pressures do these lines see? I would imagine pretty high, and that the OE style seals are designed to stretch/compress or whatever during tightening.
In the first picture you can see pieces of the seal caught up in the fitting.
I cannot find the technical name for such a type of seal, and have never seen one before like this. It's made of semi soft plastic. I have been unable to find an example of similar seals either, in my hunt to identify this seal type.
I purchased the same edelmann seal kit that everyone uses for these racks. Included were 4 small o rings that would have to be for this (I assume as they're way too small for anything else...and there's 4 of them), but they are regular style rubber. I am not sure if the kit was designed:
--to fully replace the plastic seals (this option doesn't seem right, I wil elaborate below...)
OR
--the included o rings fit inside of these plastic seals, making the plastics act as an o-ring locater. They do nestle into the plastics pretty nicely, but that doesn't mean they're supposed to get installed that way. From the factory there were only the plastics.
The reason I assume the included o rings aren't supposed to simply replace the plastic is because there is a gap around the OD of the orings when placed into the rack ports. Seems like tightening them as tight as the fittings were during disassembly would rip them up.
That is what got me thinking, perhaps they are super hard to source/make etc so as a workaround the o rings are supposed to simply get located by the original plastics. Then when tightening the o ring just gets sandwiched by the end of the tube to rack port and its outward squeeze/stretch is stopped by the plastics. If you look at the pic of the fitting again, the new o rings do seem to closer match the diameter of the end of the tube than they do the bottom of the ports.
Does anyone know where to find original seals or their name, or how the supplied o rings get used? What kind of pressures do these lines see? I would imagine pretty high, and that the OE style seals are designed to stretch/compress or whatever during tightening.
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