The spring clamps are used fro two reasons. One ,they are faster to
install when nothing is in the way. Two, they can expand and contract
with temperature changes maintaining a better seal long term with out
damaging the hoses. This is particularly important with hoses that are
connected to plastic parts.

Dennis

-----Original Message-----
From: Vanagon Mailing List [mailto:vanagon@gerry.vanagon.com] On Behalf
Of patrice b
Sent: Thursday, August 15, 2002 8:05 PM
To: vanagon@GERRY.VANAGON.COM
Subject: hoses in general

That link to the Depot's page of coolant hoses and its package deal of
all
hoses made me wonder.  I have an 85 1.9L  manual trans, and a few of the
big hoses are getting a little soft...when I was having a local (non
Vanagon expert) mechanic help me with the coolant flush this spring I
asked
what he thought about the hoses.  He said that next spring if I was
going
to flush again (there was green stuff i there from PO...it's blue-ish
now,
but the flush was not able to get out every lil bit of green stuff, so I
thought I'd repeat in a year) that it would be a good time to re-do some
of
the hoses.

Question:  if a person were to just change out all the hoses (since they
will be old enough to vote by spring)
-- is there anything else one would want to do at that time?
-- Are some of these hoses a gigantic pain in the pitooty to get to?
-- what about the metal pipes?
-- and is it a good/bad/neutral idea to get rid of the spring clamps on
those big hoses and go with screw-on clamp rings?
            (mechanic was cursing at those when he put in the new
bleeder
valve at that time)

Thank you in advance for your thoughts

--Patrice
85GL "VanaBlue"