Ethanol Gasoline? Best thing to happen to my business as the owner of a main-stream Outboard in Inboard Dealership and Marine Service Company! It cost my customers thousands and thousands of dollars in repairs every year that now flow into my business. Ethanol free fuel is not available anywhere locally, not even on the waterfront. Hell, make gasoline 25% ethanol. I need a new truck.
As Vince pointed out, it's not much of an issue any longer in cars or motorcycles where it's used up in short period. But for intermittent use and storage such as in boats...and motorcycles, it's still a demon. It decays with major collateral damage to internal surfaces and parts. We see it almost every day! We sell, install, and service a major brand outboard and inboard line and the parent company has invested heavily and studied the problem extensively to try to find or develop a work-around or a product that will mitigate the problem. Their conclusion: some products help but nothing really works to stabilize the damn stuff for more than about 90 days....and that's pushing it. Leave ethanol it in the HP fuel pump on a modern multi-port fuel injected marine engine, sometimes for as little as about six weeks, and you can be looking at $700+ in a replacement pump...not including installation. That doesn't include cleaning or replacing the injectors as is usually required. My advice: go out of you way as required to find ethanol free gasoline where it's available.
Oh yeah, I went to ride my BMW airhead yesterday( an unseasonably warm day) and found ethanol had once again destroyed the diaphragms in my Bing CV carbs.
Sorry, I just getting started in on Ethanol........
Brothers and sisters, I must confess that I too have benefited nautically from the evil embrace of the Devil Ethanol. The little 2-stroke 2½ horsepower Mercury outboard that currently pushes my gorgeous little $1
"Foundling" Com-Pac 16 sailboat around the docks was a craigslist find: some guy trying to empty his shed of a buddy's mostly worn out sailing gear, said buddy having long since returned to England for good. The deal I cut was $200 running or $100 not. He couldn't get her kicking, though I gather he didn't try very hard. I believe he just wanted it gone. So, he brought it on by, I gave him his Franklin, and he was on his way. I was left with what appeared to be an almost brand new outboard externally. I gave her a few cursory pulls with some fresh 2-stroke fuel, but not so much as a sputter. When I pulled off the carb the tale was told: it was chock full of fossilized ethanol snot. I scraped at least two full tablespoons of the stuff out of that fuel reservoir bowl--It looked just like that
Sugar In The Raw stuff you get at Starbucks, though I doubt you'd want it in your
Skinny Mochafrappalattemegaccino, or whatever you kids are swilling nowadays. Suffice it to say that after a good long bath in Marvel Mystery Oil, I cleaned her up with some spray carb cleaner, removing and blowing out all her jets and passages, and now she starts first pull every time, and has since replaced the nearly identical but older and fussier Tohatsu that came with the boat. The moral of this story is that ethanol
WILL clog up your engines' fuel systems if allowed to sit for awhile. Fortunately, that little Mercury/Tohatsu carb is the very model of simplicity--like an old textbook generic diagram of a carburetor. It only takes literally minutes to remove, disassemble and remount--even quicker than a lawn mower's, and like most lawn mowers the fuel's simply gravity-fed. So I was lucky. Thing is, ethanol also eats fuel pump diaphragms, fuel lines, and even fuel tank liners in older collectible cars, and what it'll do to some older fiberglass fuel tanks is really shocking. So anything more complicated than my litlle pull-start "popper" and you might be looking at some serious and possibly very costly mayhem. So yes, while I'll grudgingly run that ethanol spew through our family's three mid-to-late '90s daily runabouts, where it'll find its way out of the tailpipe in pretty short order, any engine, the Enfield's included, that I really care about and which is even remotely likely to have fuel sit in it for even a month or so, is on a steady diet of ethanol-free 89 octane with about 4 ounces per 10 gallons of Marvel Mystery Oil. This includes the lawn mower, trimmer and my little collection of generators. The fuel for the various outboards (couple of 2-strokes and a Honda BF50 4-stroke) also gets an added dash of
Sta-Bil 360 Marine as per spec on the bottle, with 2-stroke oil as needed to measure. For engines like lawn mowers, generators and outboards, which I know may sit for several weeks or more unused, I will also turn off the fuel tap and run that carb dry. This might not be a terrible idea for an Enfield as part of any regular winter maintenance and storage routine (along with changing the engine oil, giving her a good clean and polish, and maybe a shot of fogging oil or just squirting a little Marvel or other oil into the spark plug hole and just working that through in the cylinder), should one not be blessed with a climate with lots of semi-decent winter driving days.
Fortunately, while not exactly convenient, ideal or even sensible personal fuel-use-wise, despite the EPA being in blatant cohoots with corn growers in Iowa at the behest of every presidential candidate since maybe Millard Fillmore, it is still not
too difficult for me here in Virginia to indulge in this well-justified Ethanol-Free Fuel Fetish of mine, since I can obtain ethanol-free gas right from the pump in a designated "rural" county less than 30 minutes from where I live here in an allegedly "metropolitan" part of Virginia, according to those EPA regulatory drones. Thanks to the directory compiled and maintained by the good folks at
Pure-gas.org, I know right where to go.
All I can say is that if it bugs you that you can't even
choose to pay a little more to get fuel that won't completely bugger your valuable property, you should
write your Congressperson and both Senators. Do it every year until they fix this. I do. If more did, maybe it'd get onto their radar screens.
Topic: Ethanol Free (Read 3993 times)