Fuel What I found out.

This morning I first took four cap fulls of fuel and TRYED to light it Had to heat it to 80 Degrees and finally it burned. There was hardly any oil residue. I could pick it up with a Q-tip. Next I went for the good fuel, 80 Degrees, and waited. Lots more oil! Next I went to the gallon can with nothing in it. I took a tire pump and added some pressure and I FOUND A LEAK at the handle where it's spot welded to the can.
So with that done I took off the back plate and head of the McCoy. I didn't remove the piston or sleeve. Soaked it (the engine) in some T1:1:1 I know it's bad but it works. Now with the piston able to move and most of the burnt varnish removed, I repainted the head and cleaned ALL of the residue out of the case. Put a new back plate gasket on, left the cyclinder gasket alone. Put back ALL new bolts, put a prop on it, and went to the test stand. Fueled it, primed it, fliped it...FIRST FLIP perfect 4 stroking, I hadn't touched the needle. I ran about 16 oz through... it runs great! I GOT LUCKY!

Scott(bought a power ball ticket)Riese;-)

Scott,

Don't understand the significance of the empty can with the leak??? Is this the can the bad fuel came out of? Also every time I have done a burn test the fuel lit easily with a match, is it already cold where you live?

LAST EDITED ON Oct-07-03 AT 05:35 PM (CDT)
 
>Scott,
>
>Don't understand the significance of the empty can with the
>leak??? Is this the can the bad fuel came out of? Also every
>time I have done a burn test the fuel lit easily with a
>match, is it already cold where you live?
>
>Bob

Read post Mad as all get out.
To amswer your question YES this was the bad can..
COLD? no, much easyer to light warm fuel, 25 degrees makes a differance.

Maybe my eyes are worse than I thought, In any case, I would think if the can had a leak, ya the alcohol would absorb moisture from the air but as time went on wouldn't the nitro evaporate then the alcohol leaving mostly oil? This would cause run problems but I wouldn't think it would hurt an engine.

It also makes me wonder why your burn down test had so little oil left, oil doesn't evaporate does it?. Any fuel/chemistry experts out there that can explain this?

Where did you find the Trichloroethelene? The EPA made us quit using it 5 or 6 years ago. It''s funny, 20 years ago I went to school on trich, and the instructor told us it was harmless. 7 years ago, the EPA suddenly discovered it was a carcengenic substance and we had to quit using it. It is absorbed through your skin and accumulates in your liver, as I remember.

That ain't all De!! Years ago the doctors all told us to get a GOOD sun tan. That a good tan was healthy. Now we are paying for the Dr's GOOD advise with skin cancer.

So much for past evaluations.
Bigiron

Working in the shipyards for 25 + years you tend to TAKE the good stuff home for when you retire. I'm now retired. I go the good stuff. BYW....I know how to handle T1:1:1 just ask my other brother "Scott"

Thanks DE

Scott( aahahaaaa forgot:+

Ya, I would love to have a gallon of triclor, that stuff was good for almost everything from a degreaser to disolving and breaking apart molded epoxy parts.

Hi Scott. Well I just got back from the driveway where I burned two samples as you did. First sample gave up barely 1/4 capful of oil!! Second gallon gave up even less. I have added oil. Did your fuel boil and spit as it burned?? I think the spitting was water jumping out of the burning mixture. Both gallon cans came from the same batch, #3386. Must have been mixed on a late Friday.

OK, dumb question for all of you fuel burners. I was always taught to boil the fuel off, not burn it. Some of the synthetic oils will burn just like the fuel. That's one of the reasons to have some castor in our fuel along with the synthetic. So it is possible that if you have synthetic oil in your fuel, that when you do the burn test you are burning up the oil along with it.

I wish I had a sterno can. YES you want to boil off all of the fuel and not BURN the oil. Yes it will spit and That's water caused by the by-product of burning fuel.

Scott

>Hi Scott. Well I just got back from the driveway where I
>burned two samples as you did. First sample gave up barely
>1/4 capful of oil!! Second gallon gave up even less. I
>have added oil. Did your fuel boil and spit as it burned??
>I think the spitting was water jumping out of the burning
>mixture. Both gallon cans came from the same batch, #3386.
>Must have been mixed on a late Friday.

TE
My Batches #2543 Mine were mixed Monday Morning :0

Scott,
I once had a can of fuel that had so much moisture in it that the engine would quit when the booster was removed. I played around with it a bit and found that by turning the needle in a few turns it would continue to run...but hotter. My guess is that the moisture increased the volumetric efficiency of the fuel and you needed less. At the same time, since it was using less fuel, it was also getting less lube.
I marked that can "for parts washing only".

In response to the triclorethylene, I think some also used trichlorethane as a cleaning agent. Are both now prohibited? For some reason I thought they were both banned about 15 years ago.

And, while talking about water, many, many years ago while I still knew noting (and even less than I know now) nobody told me about the hazards of getting water into fuel and I didn't know any better. There was a hobby shop in a town that I was visiting that sold SIG fuel in bulk for something like about 2 dollars a gallon (this was a while ago, mind you). He pumped it out of a 55 gallon barrel and you brought your own jug. Not having the luxury we have now of having 30 empty fuel jugs around (Matt keeps his old jugs just to keep track of how much he is burning in a year) I accumulated some empty milk jugs. We washed these out just before I made my trip, and never dried them inside. There were water droplets clinging to the insides when I filled them. I then stored these filled jugs in a garage--hot in the summer, cold in the winter. And, not flying nearly as much as we do now, some of these jugs were still around several years later. I discovered that most of the caps had "popped". They had broken at the very top of where they were screwed on and this portion of the lid was curled. (In case anybody is wondering whether or not it is a good idea to store fuel in an empty milk jug, it is not.)

Well, I replaced the lids, but when I returned to flying (I think I took a little time off, even) I continued to use this fuel. I never noticed the difference!

Now, maybe if I had compared this fuel with something that had been filled at the factory and properly sealed I would have.

But here the fuel came from a partially filled barrel--point number one where it is open to the air and moisture.

I put it in newly washed jugs with water droplets inside the jugs.

The jugs, themselves, are a bit porous, were subject to heat and cold, and the lids popped off--and remained that way for an undetermined period of time.

And I, being unaware of any potential problems, continued to use the fuel with no apparent (to me) problems. This was when I was still flying my K&B 35 and similar engines without mufflers, but, the stuff worked.

I have always been curious as to why, now that I have learned of all of the things I did wrong.

Len

Those old green-heads were far more tolerant of mixtures than today's finely machined engines.

The amount of water that is "tolerable" is not a matter of % volume, but what happens with fine droplets being present in the combustion process. Unlike gasoline, methanol is low flashpoint/rapid burning whereas gas is much more volatile - higher flashpoint/almost explosive process. The combustion process is the result of many, many variables - not the least being the humidity of the day in question.

Scott mentioned somewhere that he had discovered a pinhole in the can? The time from the manufacturer filling that can until he used it could well have been months, and the water absorbtion rate, while very small, would have been constant. The volume in the can doesn't change as the absorbtion is by "mollecular transfusion" and alcohol is shed at the same time. Would ANY manufacturer ever "OOPS - left out the oil" in their process? - most unlikely! And, as you mentioned, burning off the methanol is an erronous process. "Evaporating" it off is the key, and speeding up that process gently is the second key. However if moisture content IS the problem, then even the evaporative process won't be accurate, in that oil content by volume may not be the problem to begin with.

Perhaps the learning process here is to not trust commercial fuels, of any brand; expect, therefore be on the alert for, problems; and change to another fuel the first time something seems amiss.

A final word on methanol/water mixtures. Talk to your top auto dragsters - they use water injection on methanol burners! BUT, they aren't relying on fuel-carried lubricants - WE ARE!

>Scott mentioned somewhere that he had discovered a pinhole
>in the can? The time from the manufacturer filling that can
>until he used it could well have been months, and the water
>absorbtion rate, while very small, would have been constant.
>The volume in the can doesn't change as the absorbtion is by
>"mollecular transfusion" and alcohol is shed at the same
>time. Would ANY manufacturer ever "OOPS - left out the oil"
>in their process? - most unlikely! And, as you mentioned,
>burning off the methanol is an erronous process.
>"Evaporating" it off is the key, and speeding up that
>process gently is the second key. However if moisture
>content IS the problem, then even the evaporative process
>won't be accurate, in that oil content by volume may not be
>the problem to begin with.

It is true that water and alcohol mix in a "different" way than most mixtures. If you add a pint of water to a pint of alcohol, you do not get a quart of fluid. The molecules of one kind of slide in between the molecules of the other, but I don't think there is any shedding of alcohol in the process.

And if water were in the fuel, if the fuel were boiled off, this would boil off, also. The mixture of water and alcohol now boils at a different temperature, however, but it does boil together--the alcohol does not boil at one temperature and the water at another. Same with freezing. You can't freeze the water out as has been erroneously reported elsewhere. We have to remember that alcohol was the first "antifreeze" mixed with the water in car radiators. The mixture boils at a lower temperature, however, so that was what prompted the change to the newer mixes of "stuff".

But boiling off, even with water present, will leave you with the oil content intact

>Perhaps the learning process here is to not trust commercial
>fuels, of any brand; expect, therefore be on the alert for,
>problems; and change to another fuel the first time
>something seems amiss.

I suppose it is possible for anybody, anywhere to forget an ingredient somewhere along the line. We buy our fuel in ten or 11 case lots, which is all custom mixed to ouir specifications at one time, and should, therefore, be consistent, we would hope, from one jug to another. The greatest risk is in buying fuel randomly packed from stock blends where it could be possible for someone to "oops" and skip a step. (Let's see now, did I put the oil in this jug?) Add so much oil, add so much nitro, fill the jug the rest of the way with methanol. Forget one of the earlier ingredients, and there's your oops.

My mother made a lemon pie once (My dad's favorite) but she forgot to put the lemon in. I don't know what it should have been called, but I guess the original name would not not be correct. At any rate, that particular pie was not his favorite. It didn't stop him from asking for another lemon pie in the future, and I would think this particular incident was an isolated incident as well.

My mother made a lemon pie once (My dad's favorite) but she forgot to put the lemon in. I don't know what it should have been called, but I guess the original name would not not be correct. At any rate, that particular pie was not his favorite. It didn't stop him from asking for another lemon pie in the future, and I would think this particular incident was an isolated incident as well.

Leonard Neumann

I love lemon pie....I made the mistake of say that I would not buy GMA fuel anymore...That's not ture...So I can sleep tonight right?

Triclorethylene was once used as a cleaner/degreaser - I used it as such in the late 50s early 60s. It was also used as an anaesthetic earlier until it was found to destroy the liver.

Clarence Lee recommends putting the fuel in a graduated container and letting the nitro and alchohol evaporate, rather than heating or burning.

RCPAUL

>Triclorethylene was once used as a cleaner/degreaser - I
>used it as such in the late 50s early 60s. It was also used
>as an anaesthetic earlier until it was found to destroy the
>liver.
>
>Clarence Lee recommends putting the fuel in a graduated
>container and letting the nitro and alchohol evaporate,
>rather than heating or burning.
>
>RCPAUL

T1: 1:1 was one of the first nerve agents in WW1. T1: 1:1 exposed to any UV or heat sources it turns into phosgene gas. BAD STUFF. Even if you have it in the area, close to welding or cutting you can be affected. Very bad for the kidneys and liver. It will shut them down with low exposure. You still can get T1: 1:1 HOWEVER, it come in transportable cans 16oz and It takes an act of God to get it. UNLESS you live out side of the US. I get mine from.........and it comes as DYE CHECK CLEANER for welding inspection. The closest stuff on the market is Brakelean from CRC products. Great Stuff.

Scott(need a transplant) Riese