Now I know tons of Beetle owners rip out their stock emissions systems (on 73 and later cars) as well as ripping out various up front fuel evaporation components.
Now in 2018, I decide to run a new tube from the front evap chamber to the charcoal canister, and while I failed with my choice of material and implementation, it has proven to me that this system is in fact necessary, especially to deal with the very common up front fuel smell that plagues so many people.
You can see that while my fuel vapors did not make it to the charcoal cannister, they did in fact condense back into liquid in the line itself and are stuck there.
Now this will be one of the last things I do. I need to clean out the metal line, and then just add the rubber lines back into them as connectors, as the original system uses. I also need to open the charcoal cannister and replace the 41 year old charcoal.
But still… that fuel vapor does build up. And the choice of line I used actually shows what happens when it condenses back into liquids.
So I’ll be adding this into the scope of the summer’s project.