Stupid is as stupid does!

[HistoricMustang]

Well, we have all done the brain failure thing but this one takes the cake for me.

Was going to change over to the street carb and do a few laps around the neighborhood on Saturday. The carb change is made and I check the fuel tank (no guage) and she needs a few gallons so I go to the shop and get a "can" (five gallons) and dump the stuff in. Well it seems that during the last track visit someone had decided to use one of my empty fuel jubs for carrying water so yep, now the tank has five gallons of water. This was discovered when the old girl fired up for a second and then went dead. Guess these things do not run very good on 50 octane.

Yes, I smelled the fluid before putting into tank and the 5 gallon can had enough residue to smell like gas.

So, all day Saturday was spend taking out and cleaning the entire fuel system. Tank (fuel cell) comes out. The large Fram filter comes out. The carb comes off. Lines are unhooked and emptied by using the fuel pump to get rid of the contaminated gas. Etc., etc., etc..

So let this be a lesson - make dang sure what you are putting into the tank is actually gas if you fill up away from a service station.

Instead of polishing and waxing and listening to Classic Rock and Roll and having a few beers enjoying the little ladies coupe, I was going through Hell swimming in gas all day Saturday with the Fastback.

I hate it when I have a brain fart!

HistoricMustang
www.historicmustang.com

 

[Route666]

Man that sucks, I always hated the fuel system bits when I helped my dad out with the mechanicing. Something about the way it dried my skin out and burned my eyes.

Hey wouldn't water increase the octane - ie, the ability to ignite is reduced - increased effort required to burn it?

 

[bnickel]

my little sister tried to help me out once by putting a full tank of gas in the car for me, she was 4 and used the garden hose.amnit:

 

[danny clemens]

My Momma says life is like a full can of gas. When you go to dump it in your car you never know what you're gonna get.

 

[10secgoal]

It could be worse. Coulda hyrdo locked your motor.

 

[LMan]

my little sister tried to help me out once by putting a full tank of gas in the car for me, she was 4 and used the garden hose.amnit:

darn, that must have been a bad day....esp because you couldn't even really get righteously angry about it

 

[bnickel]

yeah well, what can you do? luckily my tank had a drain plug so all we had to do was drain the tank and fill it back up with gas, we also added a chemical to help disperse the water. not all that bad really, especially since my dad did most of the hard work, IE: undoing the plug and getting new gas with two 5 gallon cans and then i drove the car to the gas station to fill it up the rest of the way. i did get to put the plug back in and dump the water, there was less than one gallon of gas in the tank, which is why my sister decided to fill it up. she overheard us talking about needing to make a trip to the gas station to fil it up.

 

[Soaring1]

I pulled up to the station pump, and commenced to fill my tank, then suddenly noticed it was diesel. Well, fortunately, I had only put in about a gallon before discovering my dufus. The tank was almost empty, so I went ahead and filled it the rest of the way with 93 ocatane. Well, the old girl never ran better with that little bit of diesel in her.

 

[bnickel]

my grandmother's mechanic used to tell her to put about 2-3 gallons of diesel in her car and use regular unleaded. he said it basically increased the octane of the gas, would get better mileage and also stop the engine from dieseling when she shut it off, which is what she took the car in for in the first place. oh i think he also said it helped to lubricate the valves as well. i know for a fact it did quit dieseling (engine run on) after that, i can't attest to any of the rest of it but i can believe it did help to lubricate the valves some.

 

[68rustang]

my grandmother's mechanic used to tell her to put about 2-3 gallons of diesel in her car and use regular unleaded. he said it basically increased the octane of the gas, would get better mileage and also stop the engine from dieseling when she shut it off, which is what she took the car in for in the first place.

Everything sounds reasonable except the better gas mileage thing. Although I would think fixing the real problem would be better than mixing diesel fuel with gasoline.

I almost filled my bike with diesel a few weeks ago. It was one of those pumps with two nozzles. Luckily I had selected 87 so the diesel would turn on.

 

[bnickel]

ok, well let me put this in prespective a little better. this was on her 78 Olds Delta 88, 350 olds with smog pump, EGR valve, catalytic convertor and probably the worst quadrajet GM ever made. since it was a smog motor the cam was retarded, it had huge open chamber heads, and about 8.0:1 compression with a very weak spark curve on the HEI.

to fix it properly would have meant removing all the smog equipment, changing the heads, cam, carb, intake and recurve the distributor at least and probably switching to a lower restriction dual exhaust and ditching the crappy depleted uranium pellet catalytic convertor. so bottom line was the diesel in the tank was the best solution to the problem without doing everything mentioned above.

 

[HistoricMustang]

Man that sucks, I always hated the fuel system bits when I helped my dad out with the mechanicing. Something about the way it dried my skin out and burned my eyes.

Hey wouldn't water increase the octane - ie, the ability to ignite is reduced - increased effort required to burn it?

Someone at work today mentioned putting water in the fuel to increase the performance. Any technical individuals out there who can explain this?

HistoricMustang
www.historicmustang.com

 

[68rustang]

water injection is used to cool off or avoid detonation in forced induction engines. It was used during WWII to cool the supercharged engine in the Fighter planes of the day.

A quick google came up with this:

http://www.rallycars.com/Cars/WaterInjection.html

It is completely different than mixing water with gasoline.

 

[BornInAFord]

Someone at work today mentioned putting water in the fuel to increase the performance. Any technical individuals out there who can explain this?

HistoricMustang
www.historicmustang.com

I wouldn't add water to fuel (in the fuel tank) without an emulsifier (that allows the water to mix in with the gasoline or something like methanol that absorbs water. Water will sink to the bottom of your tank and do absolutely nothing.
Water injection is different, though. Water adds to the compression of the engine because it expands 1500 times when it becomes steam. Add to a hot combustion chamber in small, measured amounts and it will help. Add too much and it will inhibit combustion and may crack pistons or heads when the cold water hits the hot metal. Water also cools the combustion chamber (it takes heat energy to expand) which lowers the NOx levels in your exhaust.

Advantages: Cheap, adds power and decreases polutants when done right
Disadvantages: Corrosive, not easy to regulate the right amount, water and oil don't mix

Make sense?

Daniel

 

[Route666]

Yeh I'd say if you could keep it in suspension in the fuel it would do the same as water injection - help cool and expand.

I was just being a little tongue-in-cheek with my first post about the octane though.

Hey here is an idea though, what about designing an engine with sufficient compression ratio that a water mist injected would compress enough to heat the water enough to split it into O and H and then burn, returning to water. Sounds semi-reasonable but conservation of energy is telling me it wouldn't work. I guess you'd need more energy to compress it than you would eventually get out of it.

 

[bnickel]

Hey here is an idea though, what about designing an engine with sufficient compression ratio that a water mist injected would compress enough to heat the water enough to split it into O and H and then burn, returning to water. Sounds semi-reasonable but conservation of energy is telling me it wouldn't work. I guess you'd need more energy to compress it than you would eventually get out of it.

that is actually fairly close to what happens anyway, sort of. water injection was originally used to do basically what you desribe only as an additition to the gas rather than instead of gas. basically, what the water injection does is slow the burn of the gas to allow for more complete combustion of the gas-air mixture and to help cool the incoming charge sufficiently to stop detonation. the addition of the oxygen from the H2O also helps in a more complete burn as well, so what the water injection does is actually similar to what you are suggesting. it can also allow you to run more timing again helping to aid in the most complete combustion possible.

whan i build my next motor, long rod 351w with roller block, some sort of fast burn head (possibly gt-40p) at least 10:1 compression and enough cam to help bleed of some cyinder pressure to allow for the high compression, but also want to use water injection. the engine will be fuel injected, roller cammed, coatings everywhere possible, that i can afford of course so i will probably use as amny coatings as possible that i can apply at home. this includes jet hot coated headers and intake and heads if possible, anti-friction coatings, oil shedding coatings, oil retaining coatings, etc. etc. i also plan to heavily port and polish the heads and intake and i may even go back to stock manifolds that have been very heavily ported and modified and the entire intake/exhaust tracts will be extrude honed to be as smooth as possible.

the idea is to make the engine as efficient as possible to maximize both power and fuel economy and i may even install some high flow cats to both clean up any polutants but also to get rid of the old car gas smell so i can carry passengers and not have them complain about how much my car smells like gas and/or exhaust, i'll also get the added benefit of a quieter exhaust system for that stealthy sleeper image.

 

[krash kendall]

Way back when I was in automotive class, our instructor told us that you can effectively clean a carboned up engine by slowly introducing water down the carb of the running motor. The water turns to steam and removes carbon buildups. He did say that there was a risk of large deposits getting stuck in the exhaust valve creating a whole new set of problems.

It sounds like a good theory, but is difficult to verify and is only a solution to a symtom of another problem.

 

[Route666]

that is actually fairly close to what happens anyway, sort of. water injection was originally used to do basically what you desribe only as an additition to the gas rather than instead of gas. basically, what the water injection does is slow the burn of the gas to allow for more complete combustion of the gas-air mixture and to help cool the incoming charge sufficiently to stop detonation. the addition of the oxygen from the H2O also helps in a more complete burn as well, so what the water injection does is actually similar to what you are suggesting. it can also allow you to run more timing again helping to aid in the most complete combustion possible.

whan i build my next motor, long rod 351w with roller block, some sort of fast burn head (possibly gt-40p) at least 10:1 compression and enough cam to help bleed of some cyinder pressure to allow for the high compression, but also want to use water injection. the engine will be fuel injected, roller cammed, coatings everywhere possible, that i can afford of course so i will probably use as amny coatings as possible that i can apply at home. this includes jet hot coated headers and intake and heads if possible, anti-friction coatings, oil shedding coatings, oil retaining coatings, etc. etc. i also plan to heavily port and polish the heads and intake and i may even go back to stock manifolds that have been very heavily ported and modified and the entire intake/exhaust tracts will be extrude honed to be as smooth as possible.

the idea is to make the engine as efficient as possible to maximize both power and fuel economy and i may even install some high flow cats to both clean up any polutants but also to get rid of the old car gas smell so i can carry passengers and not have them complain about how much my car smells like gas and/or exhaust, i'll also get the added benefit of a quieter exhaust system for that stealthy sleeper image.

You're a man after my own heart, I also want to build a FI 331 (aluminium block) with coatings everywhere, beehive springs, roller cam, rockers, etc to maximise thermal and friction efficiency, but haven't thought of water injection, mainly because I thought it was geared more toward turbos and superchargers. I must research this more!

Hey I've got a Q about your choice of CR and cam - what is the difference (besides more top end on one) between two engines with the same dynamic idle / low rpm cylinder pressure if one uses a big cam and big CR, and the other is more tame? I was thinking 10.5:1 with 96 RON (about 91AKI) or maybe 11:1 with 98, which is more rare, so wouldn't like to tour the country with an engine that needs it. Cam duration requirement comes to roughly 280 advertised for both, is that too much for good driveability?

Sorry for diverting the thread a little, I don't think starting a new thread would work, so here we are.

 

[bnickel]

well actually to clarify, it's not really the duration but rather the overlap that will bleed off compression.

i'm wanting to do it more for fuel mileage sake than overall performance, i don't want to run a cam that has a ton of overlap, just enough is all i want. i want to build the long rod roller motor for increased longevity and fuel mileage, by the combination of the higher compression and long rods as well as well as the coatings. i also want to be able to turn a low 13 to high 12 second 1/4 mile time. possibly faster if i don't have to give up too much in the mileage department. i too have been wanting to use the comp cams beehive springs on this engine. my goal is to make the valvetrain as light as possible but still strong enough to last 100,000 miles or more, well actually the whole engine for that long. i also want luxury car power and smoothness whicj means lot's of torque. basically i don't a peaky race only motor or an even more peaky street engine.

i feel like i can easily build the engine to be reliable, durable, able to pull down high 12 sec. 1/4 miles and still get over 20 miles to the gallon on pump gas. well that's my goal anyway and it's a ong way pff at the moment but i believe it is acheivable.

 

[dans70stang]

Man that sucks, I always hated the fuel system bits when I helped my dad out with the mechanicing. Something about the way it dried my skin out and burned my eyes.

Hey wouldn't water increase the octane - ie, the ability to ignite is reduced - increased effort required to burn it?

wtf? dude, watering down gasoline wouldnt increase octane. Water breakes apart the chemical compound of gasoline and there for IT WONT BURN therefore its useless. Next time you reply to a topic, plz for the love of god re-read what you write.