it's a real honor to be able to afford the cars i now have but back in the day,things weren't quite this good.if you had a nice car,chances are you couldn't drive it unless 4 or 5 guys pooled their money and bought a few gallons at 19 cents or cheaper a gallon. my solution coming from the oil patch was to go down at night and raid the drip cans on the oil wells.it wasn't the best and didn't smell so good but it got me to town to see the girls. if the old jalopy needed oil,we used bulk or re-refined double eagle..it was nasty but was 25 cents a quart.19 cents at the local food store.sometimes the station owner would drain used oil in a bucket and we took some off the top.....got us down the road. that old banger would get so hot we lit cigarettes off the manifold. today's youngsters have it pretty good ...wonder what they'll recall one day???
I remember Dad putting "reclaimed" oil in the '51 Pontiac, to replace the blue haze that puffed out the back. Always heard bad things about drip gas. It was raw gas, right, unrefined? Did it hurt the engine any to use it?
"Drip gas" was a liquid that "dripped" out of the natural gas lines (which lay on the surface in the oil fields) in cold weather. It would gather in low spots and block the pipe so the oil companies put in traps and would license people to collect it. We lived on the edge of the Texas-Oklahoma oil field (east of Borger if you're a history buff) so we had easy access to free fuel. Problem with drip is that it had a few impurities but mostly it was a low octane fuel. Our cars didn't like it very well but the tractors would run okay so dad kept one overhead tank with "car fuel" that he'd mix half and half drip and premium (back when we called it "ethyl" ) Back in the days when "green bugs" (an aphid) were killing out wheat crops it kept us moving. Then they got bigger vacuum pumps on the gas lines and just sucked the drip out with everything else. But I remember some cold mornings running the drip line with my dad.
My father in-law has a similar story. He is from rural Eastern Kentucky where there were many gas wells. In a pinch for fuel for his '49 Ford,back in the day, he knew where "drip-oil" valves were located and would get some on occasion to run his car. He said it did not run as well, but got him out of a jamb more than once.
1972 I was driving a Triumph Shitfire from Chi-town to Tampa. The POS was squirting a quart an hour from the timing cover, no matter what speed I drove. I bought a gallon of Double-Eagle in southern Georgia. Near Ocala the engine seized from it. Got towed the rest of the way, and put in new bearings and rings in the driveway. Stealing drip gas is still a big deal in the 4 Corners region. Depending on the source, it has acids in it.
My Dad worked for Gulf for 37 years. I knew what gas stations were but drip was my fuel of choice. Added a touch of deisel to put a little lubricant in it. You also got drip off of the well heads as it was sent down the line to your tank batteries. We had a 55 gallon drum behind the fence that my dad would bring in 5 gallons of drip a day to put in the drum. It had a small petcock at the bottom and you would bleed the water out of it. yes it had a definant smell. Bad on your valves though. I painted my first car with a GULF bug sprayer and laquer[Gulf Orange} TP
I was 14, drove a John Deere tractor for a guy who ran drip in it. If you remember, you started those things by spinning the flywheel on the side of the engine. I wasn't very strong or heavy. I put the edge of my shoe soles on the lip of the flywheel and gripped the top, slung my body toward the front of the tractor to start it. Because the drip sometimes had water in it, the tractor died every so often. I was black and blue from hitting the ground. But hey! I made $1 an hour.
When I lived in Taft California back in the 60's young and with a young wife, I ran Drip in my old heap of a 6 cyl. It didn't run very good but it got me to work and back. Those were the days.--TV
I'm glad Hotrod-Linkin started this; lots of interesting details have been added. I used one of those Gulf bug sprayers full of kerosene to clean the engine of my very first car.
We had a 55 gal oil drum in the Station I worked at. Whenever we put a qt of oil into a customers car, or did an oil change, we'd tip the empty cans into a big funnel and let them drip into the drum. It was all different weights, but who cared, it was new oil. Every one that worked at the station (me and the owner) used it at oil change time in our cars. HEY!...oil went for 17 cents a quart!..and gas was 22 cents a gallon...
now it's coming back to me...cars were rare that made it 50,000 miles before a major overhaul.....i guess bad oil was the reason....
The Jalopy Journal
