Modern Petrol

[Greybeard]

...know when you have tickled it enough.

If she's wet you've tickled it enough

[duTch]

 

The trouble with that hi tech/low tech anti-stink-finger-tickler is you can't feel the petrol on your finger to know when you have tickled it enough  

 I can usually either see it or smell it, or I just guess and kick, and if that doesn't work I plunge it some more until it does- doesn't usually take much even on a cold dark morning....

[BSA_54A10]

I would think that all of us of a certain age use petrol of whatever type for cleaning parts, hands or whatever. And many years ago Cleveland used the "petrol" called Discol which if memory serves was neat benzene, stand corrected if wrong on that one. 

i was under the impression that the unleaded kink started in California where the idiots said "lead, must be bad" not knowing the difference from that and proper Lead, which is great for making cast bullets from until the same idiots started to ban that as well.

But its nice to get a conversation going. 

As for Berger, my father as a young bricklayer in the 1930's used to work on the town gas retorts when they were shut down and needed repairing, very hot and dirty work as the shutdown had to be for the minimum time possible. But compared to normal work the pay was better. Coke and creosote were the by-products  along with god knows what nasty chemicals. Asbestos was healthy at that time as well. 

No it was an EU idea so they could use the crap crude to make cheap fuel and not refine all of the tars & waxes out of it.
These tars, waxes  & heavy oil fractions can not be burned inside an engine so you needed to put an after burner on the exhaust to stop passers by being choked.
Lead deposits on the after burner rendering it useless so lead had to come out of "Fuel" ( which is not petrol ).
Then to sell the idea to Joe Public they called the after burners , catalytic converters thus circumventing the questions
 "Why are you selling me fuel that my engine can not burn & why am I paying for fuel that gets burned in the muffler and not the engine ? "
Around the same time a reo rod that could be welded was invented so reinforced concrete took over from cast iron which had to be painted with lead based paints to prevent corrosion.
So now authorities had some thing to blame for all the lead oxide that was laying around in soils and being injested... leaded petrol.
Tetral Ethyl lead is very toxic if breathed in or swallowed but once it has been inside your engine and subjected to the high pressures of combustion and the heat as well. it changes state and become benine because a human body can not break it down so it can not get adsorbed.
The whole thing was a lie from start to finish, but it made good copy for newspapers and gave gum flappers lots of radio & TV time.
Oxides of lead are dangerous to all living things, including people. This had been know for a very long time but it was the best thing we had to protect metals from UV degredation so we used it every where.
All the flaking , crumbling lead paint on bridges, lamp posts and other roadside infrastructure is where the lead in roadside soils came from.
If it did come out of exhaust pipes then it would be airborn and end up in your back yard, not the front one.
Lead oxides were also added to concretes which again crumble.
Then we went crazy and added it to house paint.
Remember "One coat and white even covers black" why? because you can not see through lead oxide and house paints wee near 50% lead oxide by weight and 30% by volume.

[berger]

I have not been to the pub, mmmmm yes CATS! my lecturer at college in the mid nineties told all us in the class that rover had mastered a lean burn engine that didn't need a cat to convert nox or carbon monoxide to carbon dioxide.the  government apparently shut the project down because CATS made their mates rich {PLATINUM and other precious metals ETC} now they make thieves rich by them getting under cars and chopping them off ps lead blocks cats up so does letting a car tick over from first start while people let the heater clear the windscreen in winter, a CAT has to get hot pretty fast to do its job so scrape the windows clean and put the foot on the gas as some say

[Sav]

In the 1960's I used to work at a chemical plant and  we used to get a bucket of benzene and go clean the motorbike.

Best stuff going for degreasing and we used to slosh it all over the place!

Pleased to say I am still here!

No 'elf and safety on the modern effanol crap that dissolved the sealant on my petrol tank and the resultant gum stuck the throttle wide open!. I try and use Shell V power when available now.

[BSA Biker]

Well doesn't that take the biscuit, thanks for all the info, and as stated earlier, I do like to get things going.   

BSA_ 54A10,   when I was young and paint was good healthy stuff a gallon of pink primer weighed a ton with all the "healthy lead" in it, and it was the best thing for priming bare timber, it didn't peel later. But as you say the powers to be knew there was a problem with lead a very long time ago. Disreputable wine dealers in the middle ages would add "Sugar of Lead" to rough wine to enhance the flavour, any one caught would have their hands cut off, but it still happened. It was also done by farmers in the English West Country to rough cider, the people who drank it used to "take the waters" at Bath to reduce the resultant disorders, before it become a fashionable pastime of the rich. I also remember reading about all the Brit and US wartime bombers depositing in great quantity the particles from their exhausts all over northern Europe with no adverse side effects.   

Berger,    that about sums up politicians, as my friend RGS-Bill said, if a politician opens his mouth he's lying, and we vote for these idiots! Now I realise why they tell us that the Catalytic Converters are dangerous and need to be recycled by experts. Precious metals, it all makes sense now.

But over here in Spain I've started to use Repsol 97 octane petrol in my A7SS which is free of the ethanol rubbish-- I hope. 

[Greybeard]

I read a story about recovering platinum from Cat's from the road surface. Expensive, but the value of platinum made it viable.

[BSA_54A10]

I have not been to the pub, mmmmm yes CATS! my lecturer at college in the mid nineties told all us in the class that rover had mastered a lean burn engine that didn't need a cat to convert nox or carbon monoxide to carbon dioxide.the  government apparently shut the project down because CATS made their mates rich {PLATINUM and other precious metals ETC} now they make thieves rich by them getting under cars and chopping them off ps lead blocks cats up so does letting a car tick over from first start while people let the heater clear the windscreen in winter, a CAT has to get hot pretty fast to do its job so scrape the windows clean and put the foot on the gas as some say

Only the very early cats had platinum wire.
The latter ones used platinum plated nicrome wire.
Remember the original ones were close to $ 2000 now they are about $ 500

SimsMetal looked at recovering platinum from cats but it was not economically viable on the plated ones.
Thus the cats end up in the shreads so platinum is now an impurity in steel , and it is a bigger problem than any one imagined.
No one had ever done research on the effects of platinum on various grades of steel and now they have to.

[berger]

I am off to the pub, went to scrapyard yesterday and scrap man said that colisbro bronze is something that they have trouble with regarding sending it from their yard because of the melting down process , I have not researched this maybe someone can throw some light. right its  time

[bsa-bill]

so you needed to put an after burner on the exhaust

so that's why the frozen shopping goes off so quickly

[BSA_54A10]

I am off to the pub, went to scrapyard yesterday and scrap man said that colisbro bronze is something that they have trouble with regarding sending it from their yard because of the melting down process , I have not researched this maybe someone can throw some light. right its  time

It is a big problem for recycling because it is a Cu-Ni-Si alloy.
Ni is an impurity in Cu-Si alloys
Si is an impurity in all copper alloys except Cu-Si alloys

So it needs to be separated from all of the other copper based alloys.

[berger]

cheers BSA 54A10 thanks for that, yes they get loads of turnings that's the problem, I took some old brazatectic rods in , some with nicol some silica etc and they would only give me brass price cheers.

[BSA_54A10]

The problem is Si & Ni can not be refined out so if you end up with too much you have no option but to dilute with pure copper ( wire usually ) and take a loss on the melt or tip it out to make certified scrap and make a bigger loss.