They do keep a very long time that way yes. But nothing is 100% gas tight.
yep.
I ran a 2-stroke dry, left it over the winter. Next spring nogo. The clunk had dried completely into soggy gelatinous oil.
Whereas a car will generally do a couple of years on a full tank before the petrol starts to get too old to start..
best is about 1/4 full, then top up with fresh before starting..
>
With a 2 stroke it's more likely that the bulk of the petrol has evaporated so what gets sucked into the crankcase is very oil rich, this fouls up the mixture ratio and oils the plug. Witness the difficulty in starting followed by 4 stroking on wide throttle with dense clouds of smoke as it clears its throat.
Me too, ran like a sewing machine but I wanted something more powerful...
AJH
"Winter" petrol, usually supplied from November through to April in the UK goes off relatively quickly but is probably still ok for a year or so. "Summer" petrol, presumably due to it being slightly less volatile, is still usable after three or more years and may last even longer than that ...if the wheelie bin doesn't leak :)
Case in point, every September or October I fuel to the brim a vehicle I lay up for winter and its always a near first time starter come spring. A few years ago I left it three winters when I spent some time working abroad and it still ran ok on my return. It also passed its MOT too without a problem despite the long layup as it was properly stored in the first place :)
Pretty sure they don't mess about with petrol winter v summer. They do with diesel, the "wax" can precipitate out at low temperatures blocking filters and fuel lines. Used to be a serious problem, tales from my father of fires being lit under the fuel tanks of trucks when we used to get proper winters.
Usually under the sump, not the diesel tank. Old oils, pre- multigrade, became so thick when cold that it was hard to turn the engine over.
Diesel doesn't become thick enough that it's a problem to pump it out of the fuel tank, but it does precipitate wax crystals. In bulk it still flows well enough, but if you pass it through a small space, like the fuel filter or the injection pump, it blocks. The fix for this in Western Europe is to electrically heat the filter body. In Eastern Europe it's to use a heated pre-tank of a gallon or two, but there's still no need to heat the main tanks.
But of course was rare for a small bike in that it was a four-stroke.
No - under the fuel tank. I can not only remember seeing this in Aberdeen when a kid - but much later on in TV film footage from Russia. It's one reason the UK army stuck with petrol engines for much longer than sensible.
The big name petrol producers certainly used to, in fact that was their USP.
I remember a TV advert showing a balloon used to demonstrate that winter petrol was more volatile than summer.
Derek G
I remember doing it, accompanied by a blowlamp onto the fuel filter and sedimentor bowl to warm them up, followed by a trip to buy some petrol to put in the tank as soon as the engine got running. Or towing the dead coaches into the workshop and aiming a 30KW blown air heater at the appropriate bits for a quarter of an hour or so. Handy things, petrol Land Rovers.
If you left the engine running overnight, the engine heat warmed up the diesel returning to the tank just enough to prevent the problem. Usually.....
I had a Nissan car and in the hand book it suggested that you mix paraffin with the diesel for winter use, it then had a proviso and said not legal in UK.
Gary
I'd add "any more than the return does" to that last bit.
I once worked as a filling station night attendant on the 74 in Southern Scotland.. There was an all night cafe there too,, it was a popular truckers stop.. It would be about forty years ago now,, an one night it was so cold,, trucks that had travelled many miles were just stopped in their tracks... It was a least minus twenty,, I remember the news said we was the coldest spot south of warsaw... An the road was littered with loads of paralysed lorrys....
Frozen Diesel was the universal wail from the truckers in the cafe.. You wouldint think it would affect them big lorrys once they was well warmed up like that,,but it did...
I guess in countrys where they expect extreme cold they will have something built in to the machines to keep the warm..
Or they are more careful to drain the water traps.. Or maybe trapped condensate water gets frozen in their tanks,, Or perhaps deisel is better formulated now.. Or tanks can be insulated,, does that happen ? Or water froze in radiators,, I think there was some of that too,,?
Whers the finger pointin..??
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Some of them might have had more to wail about. 40 years ago, there were still trucks on the road with no cab heaters.
Oh, it certainly did.....
Block heaters on occasion. Fire brigades here used to use them to preheat the engines in the appliances (Oil and water, with a circulating pump for the oil, too.) to reduce the shock of going from dead cold to flat out in a couple of seconds. Didn't stop the tops coming off Cummins pistons in the 70s, though.
In the compressed air system, too. Modern brake air systems have air dryers, too.
Unlikely, as it would have to come a fair way up the tank to cause a problem, the dip tube is normally an inch or so up the tank. Although, I have seen a build up of ice crystals bocking a sedimentor bowl on at least on lorry.
It is.
Wouldn't help.
Most British people then used to only put protection in down to about
-5C, as they didn't need the anti-corrosion protection they need now.
Optional extras, and the driver can always wear a coat and gloves. And on some trucks up until at least the 60s, you could wind the windscreen up out of the way to see through the frost on it.
Block heaters (oil, coolant or both) are pretty common here in northern MN, where it usually makes it to -30 for a few days of the year. I've seen battery heaters too, although those are less common. Not much runs on diesel out here in the US compared to the UK - plant equipment, tractors, buses etc. are normally petrol. Bigger trucks are usually diesel though, so I assume they pre-heat the fuel.
cheers
Jules
We were somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when the drugs began to take hold. I remember Tabby saying something like:
Avoid if possible, bastard things.
We were somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when the drugs began to take hold. I remember Nick Leverton saying something like:
Crap.
We were somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when the drugs began to take hold. I remember Steve Firth saying something like:
Jeez, yes. Fond memories of starting bastard nylon props with finger-slicing edges.
Rare perhaps for a British made under 200cc capacity 4 stroke, excluding things like the BSA Beagle,Ariel Colt etc but by 1958/59 Honda had arrived.
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