Tip & How-To about Chevrolet Corvette

Fuel door manual release.

This tip is for 1997-2004 Corvettes:
This is something that will save you some hassle at a gas station if you ever have this problem. You probably already know there is a manual fuel door release cable you can pull if the push button in the console ever fails to open the fuel filler door. If not, it's under the carpet behind the driver's seat. Sounds easy enough, right? Well, while it's not exactly hard to do, in fact it's quite easy. On the other hand, if you are wearing a light colored shirt you are likely to get it dirty reaching under the carpet. The carpet isn't just lying there, the edges are covered by other trim pieces. If the switch ever fails to open the fuel filler door, you need to pull the carpet back and find the manual release cable to open the fuel filler door. This could be a problem if it's cold or raining, or as mentioned above, if you are not dressed for dusty work. One day while I was working in my garage, I decided to find my manual fuel door release cable since I had never actually seen it other than what I read in the owner's manual. I had to remove the inside liner of the driver's side rear storage compartment in order to be able to pull the carpet back and reveal the manual fuel door release cable. After finding it, I thought how much easier it would be to have an extension to that cable so if I ever needed to use this manual release I wouldn't need to remove two pieces of carpet. So what I did was attach a short piece of mono-filament fishing line to the cable, and just dropped the end in the driver's rear storage compartment. Then just replace the carpet and the liner to the rear storage compartment and forget about. This way if my switch ever fails to open the fuel filler door all I need to do is open the rear storage compartment door and give the line a tug to open the fuel filler door.

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