get out and drive your hotrod, classic or collector car! I spent the afternoon draining the tank, flushing the fuel system and changing the fuel filter on my dad’s Cobra. It ran poorly the few times he drove it last year and this spring it didn’t want to start and when it finally started it wouldn’t idle. after thinking about it he realized he hasn’t put gas in it in at least 2 years! He’s not up for crawling around under cars anymore so I spent the afternoon working on it with him. The fuel in the filter looked like coffee. All gas sold in our area has ethanol in it now. Once we got the nasty out and some fresh gas in it runs better than ever! Unfortunately Thats when it started to rain, so we had a beer and Dad retold some stories about the good old days when gas didn’t go bad and beers were 10c.
Keep your fuel cells, gas tanks, gas cans, sealed tight. That ethanol in the gas will pull moisture right out of the air and ruin it for good. I helped a person with her 90’s off topic Fuel injector car. Others who helped before, just kept cranking and cranking and cranking. After a monthlong failure, of just cranking, she calls me. I tell her, drain the gas and replace with fresh gas. Her helpers get that done and proceeded cranking some more. She calls me, that didn’t help. Did they drain the fuel rails? What’s that? Just tell them what I said. She calls, its running, but the guys said the engine no good. Why? It’s smoking real bad. Can you afford a oil change? No she says. Get in a gently drive around the neighborhood. But its smoking. Don’t worry, you’ll see. During that monthlong process of cranking, they put a ton of ethanol- water- contaminated fuel, down in the crankcase. It was steam coming out of engine. It clear up and she drove five more years until the transmission bit the dust.
Being raised in the Seattle area, I was always taught to lay the cars and boats up with full tanks to minimize condensation. No more. I try to leave them with 1/4 or so. If they don’t run right, another 1/4 tank of fuel usual fixes it. If they don’t run at all, it’s drain and replace. On several occasions I’ve had them drive ok, but break up at higher rpm’s and full throttle. Even in Tucson, where there’s damn little moisture over the summer. Monsoons excepted.
I brought our MGB home from the storage garage the other week and the same thing. It was missing when accelerating. I took it to be too cold out (50 deg. And no choke). I put a new set of plugs in it cause I had a set, and no change. So I took it to the gas station and filled it up with fresh premium gas. As always, I added store-and-start to the gas. After another mile of driving, clean revving through the gears. I always change the oil, full synthetic, when I put them away for the winter so the contaminants don’t corrode it.
No. Ethanol is soluble in water but it isn't particularly hygroscopic. Leave pure ethanol uncovered and it will readily absorb water vapour from the air until the water constitutes about 4% of the total, and then stop. The only way to get the water content higher than about 4% is to add it expressly. There might in fact be good reasons to do that, but that isn't important for the purpose at hand. What actually happens is this. The mutual miscibility of any proportional blend of petrochemical fuel, ethanol, and water varies with temperature. Low-ethanol blends are problematic for all kinds of reasons, e.g. they are more volatile than any of their constituent ingredients, leading to vapour-lock issues etc. And the temperature in their miscibility matrices where water becomes miscible with the rest falls within the ambient range your fuel tank is likely to see over a year. The mixture is able to hold an amount of water in solution at warmer temperatures, but as the weather cools the blend ceases to be miscible with water, so the water separates out. That water isn't infinite. The capacity of the blend to absorb water was limited, so the amount of water separated out is limited. But here's the thing: none of that is an issue with high-ethanol blends. Have you ever tried to freeze vodka? The temperature you'd need to hit to get water to separate out isn't something you're going to do by accident. Water held in solution in ethanol is unavailable for processes of corrosion to ferrous metals like your fuel tank. The more ethanol in the mix, the more water you can hold in solution. And, I've read research which indicates that ethanol is corrosive to aluminium alloys only at such levels of purity that even water absorbed from the air is enough to act as a corrosion inhibitor. Ethanol is used as a drying agent in all kinds of industrial applications, and now all of a sudden it's a wetting agent? You'd have to blend a fuel very carefully to bring that about! It makes you think. Luckily I'm generally sceptical of conspiracy theories ...
Lots of big words in that, I won’t claim to understand the science part, but it is obvious from experience that modern gas doesn’t age well. The easy and enjoyable solution is windshield time!
Gosh, if all that ETHANOL in the gas, usually "up to 10 percent" , is ATTRACTING water, just add a little METHANOL to ABSORB the water. Simple.. But, yes , drive them. Ben
So what you’re saying is you don’t need to keep the lid on your gas cans, or leave the gas cap off the filler neck of your car. The one thing you left out of your long winded speech, is the fact that when the fuel turns to shit your car won’t run on it. I repeat, your car won’t run on it.
What I'm saying is a shot of vodka in an empty tank isn't going to cause the tank to fill up with water, gas cap or no.
Well I subscribe to the keep your tank full when you park it because of the condensation issues. But I’m am very happy that my dad didn’t and only had a 1/4 tank in my woody that has been sitting for the last 16 years. He used the stuff that saves your gas if it sits for a while but after that long I didn’t even try to fire the thing up. I will say even though it’s stinks like hell I’m mixing it with good fuel so I can run it in my lawnmower but it still doesn’t like the bad gas and sputters if the mix isn’t right. And I am a firm believer in driving your hot rod because it doesn’t help it none to be sitting in a garage not doing anything.
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