Well.... another lesson well learnt, and before it happened in an Aircraft.

I was a bit short on the proper Jet fuel hose, so I used a few lengths of 'Nitro' hose seeing as none of the local LHS's stock the right stuff.

In a word - don't use it. Kero makes it bloat and go soggy and kinda slimy. From there, the hose becomes compromised and can balloon and/or rupture.

Here's what happened when I was running the 'Twins': http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZUli0n2KhME

I'd already gently nudged the throttle a couple of times and thought I'd give it a bit more of a decent stab. That's when the hose on T1 (port side) let go - at about 3/4 throttle. Probably pretty lucky that I didn't have a fire, but I caught it pretty much straight away. And I had the fire extinguisher, watering can and hose nearby anyways.

T2's substitute hoses didn't suffer the same failure purely because they were new and hadn't had Kero through them the week before.

We live and we learn.

Thought it might pay to share my folly so that others might perhaps not make the same mistake.

Had this happened inside an Airframe, the plane would most probably have been lost - by the time a Pilot would have realised what had happened, she'd have had a belly fuel of fuel and some nice hot Turbines to set it off.

Still, that's why I'm on a test-bench - still plenty to learn and do yet.

BJ