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Bertram31.com General Bulletin Board
Re: Affect of Ethanol
Posted By: bruce In Response To: Re: Affect of Ethanol (DavidR)
Date: Tuesday, 7 March 2006, at 7:01 a.m.
David,
My initial solution would be to hang every politician that supports ethanol based fuels.
It is nothing more pandering to the farmers and now to foreign imports of sugar cane.
The internal combustion engine as it is now designed is not ready to run on ethanol.Forget the tank problems, just go to any car dealer in the areas where they sell that crap and see whats going on.
I've had some inside info on marine engines for a little while on fairly new boats that don't have tank problems as most all small boats use aluminum tanks.
Its being kept quiet from the public as out of warrantee claims would then have to be covered as defective engines not able to run on available fuels.Does sugar cane ring any alarms?
The best way to kill an engine is to dump sugar in the gas tank.I have seen the black tar residue in engines from up north with aluminum tanks.
It sure looks like burned off sugar residue to me.
I rebuilt a few engines in my youth that had sugar dumped in the gas tank and it looked exactly the same.Older resins may dissolve in fiberglass tanks.
I am trying to find an older glass tank and cut a piece of it out and soak in ethanol based fuel, then burn off the fuel in a beaker and see whats left.
While it may add to the problem, tank residue being disolved I think is a bigger issue which not everybody has.On some of my 31 conversions where I've pulled the fill and pickup plates, the tanks look brand new inside with little or no crap.
I just had the tanks flushed on a 28 Bert gas.
We ran the pump for a while and got very lttle debris.
I added some solvent for varnish residue and the gas turned yellow as it dissolved the deposits left by old crappy gas and smelled really bad.I pumped out and flushed twice with clean gas till it ran clear. After a 1/2 hour on the clean tank, both engines increased rpm and ran smoother.
The problem is not going away though and as usual the public will be left holding the bag for costly repairs as the result of government interference without the proper study or knowledge of implementing alternative fuels.
If I had an older gas 31 that saw this problem I would,
1. Have to convice myself through my own testing that indeed the tank resins are disolving before I would change the tank.
2. Flush out the tank as I did on the 28 and see if that makes a difference.
3. I'm still gonna have some engine problems regardless and will have to learn to live with that or convert to diesel which will only increase the value of the boat and get better fuel mileage. But if money is an issue, that may not be an option.I don't have a PHD in chemistry and can't argue the effects, or non effects of ethanol based fuels based on scientific theories and facts.
I'm just the low man on the totem pole who sees the results of the brain trusts spinning their webs and wands.
The end result of all my mumbling is there seems to be no quick, cheap fix to this problem.
Get rid of the ethanol based fuels would be the best thing.
Next, dismantle Washington one scavenging rodent at a time to prevent this from happening again.
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