You do not need that kind of negativity in your life' - Piki Piki Review on the Guglatech Fuel Filters

No, not the filter, the dirt and rubbish the fuel filters must keep out of your bike, you do not need that kind of negativity in your life.

You would think in this day and age with millions of vehicles and trillion dollar fuel industries it would be stupid to worry that you would still get bad, dirty fuel from fuel stations. Unfortunately in this big world and the need to supply fuel to almost every corner of the globe, even to remote locations, the way fuel is stored and sold means contamination is a real issue.

We were under the impression that fuel should generally be of good, clean quality wherever you buy it and so when we set off on our RTW trip in 2010 through Africa we quickly got lessons handed to us about not to assume that clean fuel will be the norm.

One of the worst things is to troubleshoot a stranded bike and one of the items to troubleshoot is whether you got clean fuel.

It is far better to try and eliminate that possibility all together and spend the time troubleshooting what really got the motorcycle to give up the ghost.

Our first real issues were in Ethiopia when another overlander warned us to check the fuel as it’s dirty and will clog our fuel filters. On older carburettor bikes it is easy to replace fuel filters and filters cost very little. On new Fuel Injection bikes the filters sometimes also have a fuel regulator built in and those units are expensive and not so easy to source.

Dirty fuel can cost you a fuel pump and down time. This is what Ethiopian fuel looks like:

We used coffee drip paper filters in Ethiopia to filter the fuel when filling up. The fitlers looked like this every time we filled up.

Our friends Peter and Leonie from AmsterdamtoAnywhere also had issues with dirty fuel and stuff clogging their Fi Honda CRF fuel pump inlet and filters. They were on a 3 year round the world motorcycle odyssey.

We started using coffee drip filters in a cut off Coke bottle while filling.

Low and behold every time we filled up the filters were dirty. It was evident many of the filling stations’ underground tanks were leaking water and corroded. That stuff ended up in our tanks. Soon afterwards one of the BMW Dakar’s fuel-pump quit on us. In the end it cost us 3 weeks of sitting in Addis Ababa and 400 usd to get a 200 usd pump to us.

As we started our new trip in the USA we sourced filters from an Australian company but for some unforeseen reason they never made it to South Africa. In the search for new in-tank filters I stumbled upon Guglatech who just about started to manufacture in-tank filters. Guglielmo Ferrazzani is an Italian dude who had issues with his new KTM on a trip to France. As he is in the industry he started to produce filters for motorcycles.

First I developed the most advanced fuel pre-pump filter and then the neck filters. We are the only ones who developed and created EFI Total protection.” says Guglielmo.

Full review on Guglatech Fuel Filters here:

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