i fell victim

[neil]

my 1964 b 25 fell victim to ethanol last night i changed the tank in the 31 this winter and decided to wait on the little boat both engines within a five minute period shot craps. i had changed the filters every couple hrs the fuel that was in the filters this morning was the color of rootbeer thank god i have a few extra boats to play with neil

[Peter]

Neil,
What a bummer!

Had you seen brown crap in the fuel on prior filter changes? Was this the first filter change after using the E-10?

Did it do any damage to the engines? Any black goo?

Were you running in rough or choppy waters that may have caused some crud to get agitated up from the bottom of your tank?

How full were your tanks at the time of the problem?

I cleaned out an old tank that never had any ethanol fuel in it, and the stuff that came out was about the color you describe. It looked like there was water in the gas too. I put the last two gallons or so into a bucket and let it evaporate off over a couple of days. What was left, the stuff I thought was water, was some oily sort of dark brown residue. It doesn't evaporate at all, it smells awful, and it is full of all sorts of particles that look like fine rust. Nasty stuff!

I would guess there is about a quart of this left in my bucket. The total amount of gas I pulled out of the tank was about 10 gallons, so the crud-to-gas ratio was about 1 quart to ten gallons, but all the crud ended up in the bottom with the last couple of gallons I put in the bucket.

Meanwhile, thinking it was likely water, but curious why the brown flecks wouldn't precipitate out of it, I took a little sample of the gas/water mix and put it in a clear jar. I added ethanol to see if I could get the water to go back into solution. Even after adding almost as much ethanol as the total sample this "water" stuff wouldn't go back into solution in the gas. Now I know why...it is because it isn't water at all.

I also took some of the brown flecks and tried dissolving them in ethanol. No dice. The did not dissolve, which is a good thing, because that means they would get caught by a good fuel filter.

The tank that I emptied had a layer of brown sludge on the bottom. I cleaned out what I could reach (baffles prevented me from getting to all parts of the tank) and I have been letting a couple of gallons of E-10 steep in there for a week or two. I'm hoping I'll be able to dissolve and flush out whatever the crap is, but I'm not holding my breath.

Since this particular tank never had ethanol fuel in it, whatever the brown oily sludge is it came from ordinary gas. I think it is decades of varnish build up and so on, and maybe it is this gunk that gets dissolved by the ethanol and makes its way into the rest of the fuel system.
Just one more happy thing to think about with the ethanol situation.

[bobfioresi]

Neil; sorry to hear this. I called your wifes no. on monday to tell you that we arived back in montauk in 3 hrs 20 minutes. All is well. On the way up to mv we used 98 gallons. My radio was working on the way back, to montauk , but very noisy in cockpit and i couldn,t hear you if you called. Did you have a good time in Block?. Thanx again for doing all that work. It was great BOB

[Matt K]

There's a guy on ffsw.com complaining of ethanol eating his speedcraft glass tank, here's part of his post.

My Speedcrafts custom fiberglass tank has finally succumbed to E-10.. The gel coating on the inside is coming off in sheets.

[neil]

my new tank went in last week. then the boat went to the mechanics only to find exactly what i was afraid of both engines are toasted,the blachk shiny goo was all over,the vaves hung up and the underside of the carb looked as though i painted it jet black . next spring i will put in a pair of new 3 liters merc is coming out with a fuel injected model. if any of you guys are gambling with this etanol thing dont do it get your tank the f out of your boat thank god i put a new tank in the 31 last winter neil

[In Memory Walter K]

Neil-I've been trying to find out about those 3.O Mercruisers with fuel injection and can find out nothing...even from my yard that sells Mercruisers. I assume that ups the HP from 130? When will the engines be available? Also, about the black goo in your engine. You may be able to save them. Check with Randall. He flushed his engines out with Acetone. They seem to be running fine now. He's been running since with Avgas he's buying at East Hampton airport, but he's gotten another season out of them.
Peter-as I understand it Ethanol may bring in the water to your tank, but it doesn't mix together with it no matter how much you shake the two together. In many ways that's the problem. Once the two sit at the bottom of your tank they stay there...and grow as more is generated. Bottom drains in a tank might solve some of the problem, but as of now would be illegal. Walter

[lobsta1]

Neil,
what did you use for a tank in the 31 & what are you replacing the 25 tank with? Where did you get your tank made?

I just hauled my 33 this week. EARLIEST I have ever ended a season. Just so I can replace the tank in my 1978. What makes it a particular pain for me is I have a teak cockpit.

Al

[neil]

both my new tanks are alumium they were made in tomrivers nj i will get you the phone number tomorrow. as far as the new motors go i have heard they will be availbe either late winter or early spring

[R Cahoon]

Neil and Co.
Our techs saw 3.0 EFI's during there MERC U tech session last February, but since then they have scraped the 3.0 EFI program. Not sure why.

Keep Smilin

[Peter]

Walter,

I believe you are right that a sump drain would be illegal under current regs. I think it came up a while ago on the old board. One way around it would be to have the tank fab'ed with an extra pick up tube that pulls from the lowest possible point with the regular pick up tubes slightly higer.

It isn't a difficult calculation to figure out how many inches deep 10% of the capacity of the tank is. And since nearly all the ETH comes out with the water, that is the biggest puddle you would get with phase separation even in a full tank. Set the main pick up tubes at that height, and they will never draw the water/ETH puddle into the fuel system. Then set the extra sump tube all the way to the bottom.

The extra tube could be used with a small pump to test for and/or remove a water bottom from the tank, or Y-valved over to the fuel system to scavange the very last of the gas out in a situation that calls for doing so.

BUT the next question is if this is worthwhile?

I am not clear on whether the water/ethanol bottom can be made to go back into solution after phase separation. After all, in the days before ethanol wasn't the cure for water in the gas to add DriGas which is just ethanol? Didn't the ethanol cause the water to go into solution in the gas and run "harmlessly" through your engine?

Water is 100% misable in the ethanol, and is only mixed into it, not chemically combined with it either before of after phase separation. So chemically speaking the only thing that changes to cause phase separation is the ratio of ETH to water. Therefore it seems to me that changing the ratio back would reverse the process.......but I have not tried this and I do not know if it actually works. And furthermore the total amount ot ETH might be pushed up to undesierable levels (over 10%) even if it did work.

What I do know is that if you have experienced phase separation and you successfully draw off the water/ethanol bottom, the remaining gas can be brought back into spec by adding the correct amount of ethanol. The big trick is to determine exactly how much ETH to add. If it was only a relatively small amount of fuel, say 100 gallons or so, you could probably make a pretty good stab at it by adding 7% ethanol and wind up close enough to spec to be able to use up the remaining fuel. My thinking is that the relatively small amount of fuel you recover in this way would not expose your engines to out-of-spec fuel conditions for a prolonged time.

On the other hand if you had a huge tank, I think you would be wise to bring in some techanical help and testing equipment to be sure to get the correct amout of ETH and assure your fuel is in spec. I read somewhere that some fuel distributers offer such a service for gas stations which have experienced a phase separation problem in their big storage tanks.

It would be in scenarios like these where the double pick-up thing could be a help, but really, is it worth it?

About the biggest down side of not having such a sump drain is that you could have phase separation and not be aware of it because you have no easy way to test for it. As a result it is more likely that you could wind up running some nearly straight ETH into your engines at start up.

BTW In my post above I know that the stuff in the bottom of my tank was neither ethanol nor water, as none of it has evaporated even up til now. Either water or especially ethanol would have been long gone by this time. And as I stated the fuel that I tookout of the tank was pre-ethanol for my area.

So when I added ethanol to see if the "water" would go into solution with the gas, the problem was that I didn't have water in the gas at all, but rather some sort of nasty oil-based varnish. What the effects of mixing this stuff with ethanol and running it through your fuel system are, I couldn't say.

Peter

[alano]

FWIW, I just had an aluminum tank built and had them put a stripper pick up at the rear of tank (USN has them installed on thiers on the small boats) as close to zero clearance on the bottom as feasable w/o contact. Will fill the fish box with H2O and move coolers full of water to the stern and run at 1400 rpm, use a hand pump to strip any water/gunk yearly. Regards, Alan.

[In Memory Walter K]

Good idea. The extra pickup could even be capped on the top of the tank. As long as you could have access to it for testing. As far as adding back the lost octane, would a shot of Octane Boost do it? Easy to buy and store.