Gasoline Storage

[LongPoint]

I live in one of the counties that border Harris county so its my fault Houston has crappy air. I did a search and I did find non-ethanol gas, listed as Mogas, available in the next county south of me. When I get the tank ready I will take a road trip to see if its true. I wonder if it has the green die in it like the Navy mogas had.

 

[358156 hp]

Another strike against storing gas in plastic is the tendency of some chemicals to evaporate through the plastic itself. Alcohol seems to do it easily. I seem to recall having issues with some plastic gas cans sucking in the sides in the past. The evaporating solvents can get out, but air, which is denser, can't get in.

 

[RBHarter]

Av gas would be fine in non-catalytic engines .
100LL aka low lead contains 5 times the lead of of 1965 regular .
Av gas is dyed Red for 80/87 octane , blue for 100LL , green for 100/130 octane and purple for 130/145 octane .
My 1979 Chevy LUV ran great and got 32 mpg on a mix of unleaded 80/87 100LL and 100/130 . It had long headers and zero emissions gear .
The 61' International 345 would not run on anything over 80/87 and that had to be cut 25% with regular or unleaded to keep the hill power .

5 gallons of 100LL direct will foul spark arrestors and and catalytic converters to the point of no power exhaust stoppage .

I worked for a Subaru dealer for a while in the 90's . A guy brought in a SVX , the one with the 240cid , 240 HP , 260 ftlb H6 , as a no/low compression no start . It seems the owner was an AG flagger and occasionally he was "stuck out in the back 40" and low on fuel so he'd just put 2-3 gallons of gas in it out of the AG truck . I suspect that there may have been projectile damage to the converters but I wasn't the mechanic . At any rate he had come over Donner pass and it was running great when he Sacramento but it was a good thing it's all down hill from Truckee or he wouldn't have made to Reno . The little black box showed that in the last 100 miles it had advanced to 56° BTDC . For those not in the know thats a lot of advance even at or above 5,000 rpm with a 10 to 1 compression engine . It is actually firing with the piston about half up the cylinder .
He had apparently filled it up with 100/130 with only a gallon or so of 92 oct unleaded .
All 6 rods were bent down to about 7 to 1 compression . Why it didn't come apart is anybody's guess .

 

[fiver]

hmm 100LL ??
sounds like a good thing the cats fell off the ol car right after I got it.
it was one of those freak accidents that sometimes happen with new cars.
I had driven 180 miles to visit some family when the tragedy occurred, luckily I found a shop that could repair the pipes but they could only get a full set of stainless exhaust, but without the little converters, since I was in such a bind I went ahead sucked it up and had it repaired with what they could get.

I mean I guess if I happened to be at the airstrip [I can see across the field] and happened to be running out of gas I could probably break out the tuner and make it safe to drive the mile back home.
I guess i could/would somehow manage to run most of the fuel out before filling back up with regular premium again.

 

[LongPoint]

The site listed 87 and 92 octane at a Buccees station. The green mogas I was talking about is what uncle sugar used in tow tractors, NC5's and other ground support equip back in the 70's.
I remember back in my hotrod days, 10 degrees initial and another 22-24 degrees advance all in by 2000 rpm was the sweet spot in my sb Ford. Wow, 56 degrees advance, like my dad used to say, them pistons are going to swap holes.

 

[fiver]

56 is too much.
even the old ford cosworth engines that idled at 10-K only started out with like 20.

 

[Ian]

My first car was a VW. I'd put in half a tank of 87 unleaded and go out to the municipal airport and fill the rest up with avgas, whatever they were using in the Cessnas and Mooneys there (the Mooney plant was at the end of the main runway). I could crank up the whole timing curve and actually manage to keep up with traffic.

 

[Bret4207]

Nope, not just you. Sta-Bil has made our shop more money than any other single liquid product. What it does is bind with the varnishes in fuel and settle out to the low points of a fuel system (like the bottom of a carburetor bowl where the main jets are, bottom of fuel filters, pick-up screens, etc.). The sludge is very much like Permatex 3H aviation form-a-gasket, nothing will dissolve it and it's extremely sticky, gooey, and nearly impossible to clean out. When poured directly into a vehicle's fuel tank, I've seen it ruin fuel injectors and cause intake valves to stick in their guides. It simply does murder to gas generator fuel systems.

I use and recommend a product called Phase Out for gasoline, especially for use in small engine fuel containing ethanol.

That's exactly the same experience I had. Nasty, stuff to deal with. And we have ethanol fuel blends that are death on any small engine system more than a few years old, and some brand new ones too! Can't seem to convince people that 6-8 month old E10 gas mixed with 2 stroke oil at 50-1 (or leaner) is just not a good idea at all. Gets old seeing the same thing time after time with the same people. Good thing Zama carbs on box store Poulans and Huskys are cheap.

 

[Bret4207]

I find this all very interesting. I have the same plastic 1.5 gallon gas can for the lawn mower for 20+ years. Just the last two years have I found a source of non-alcohol fuel. Added a measure of Sta-Bil every fall to however much was left in the can. Run the mower out of fuel every fall. I do find small dots of brown stuff in the screen of the funnel in the spring, but doesn't seem to hurt anything.

I hear the same thing from other parts of the country. IMO it depends on the fuel blend you get locally. I believe some blends are just prone to reacting to the ethanol. The ethanol itself brings all sorts of problems to some types of plastics. I've seen dozens and dozens of fuel lines turn to gummy worms because of ethanol. In fact I just made one nice little Homelite Super EZ out of 2 bad ones and I'm sure it was ethanol that did them both in. One had a gummy worm fuel line and rock hard with varnish filter that ethanol blends cause and the other had the classic exhaust side piston scoring that trying to run a 40 50-1 ethanol blend with often gives when the ethanol breaks down the oils lubricating properties, especially in a saw that wasn't meant to run at 50-1.

I had plastic 6.5 gallon cans I had for over 20 years that were fine until ethanol hit the market. 3 out of 4 of those cans are NG anymore, body cracks and nozzles got real brittle real fast. The last one I treat real gentle these days. OTH, the old metal cans keep chugging along.

 

[Bret4207]

I wish they'd just stick to making tortillas and booze out of it instead of motor fuel. Ethanol fuel is a farce, it's been well-proven that it takes one gallon of #2 diesel fuel to create one gallon of ethanol, and if you look at the BTUs per gallon, the efficiency is a large negative, meaning that even if the tractors, combines, trucks, and distilleries ran on ethanol, the process isn't sustainable.

IIRC the corn subsidies for ethanol are about done, have been being phased out for some time. The ethanol is supposed to be an "oxygenator" that is alleged to help fuels without the higher octane burn cleaner and that's why it's used, or so I read.

 

[Bret4207]

Av gas would be fine in non-catalytic engines .
100LL aka low lead contains 5 times the lead of of 1965 regular .
Av gas is dyed Red for 80/87 octane , blue for 100LL , green for 100/130 octane and purple for 130/145 octane .
My 1979 Chevy LUV ran great and got 32 mpg on a mix of unleaded 80/87 100LL and 100/130 . It had long headers and zero emissions gear .
The 61' International 345 would not run on anything over 80/87 and that had to be cut 25% with regular or unleaded to keep the hill power .

5 gallons of 100LL direct will foul spark arrestors and and catalytic converters to the point of no power exhaust stoppage .

I believe it was the lowest grade Av gas that was recommended for storage. But as with anything these days, I'd take it all with a grain of salt and talk to a reputable fuel supplier about long term storage.

Back during the first gas crisis, when gas prices jumped from a reasonable 27 cents a gal to an obscene 41 cents a gal (!!!!!) my Dad filled a 55 gallon drum with regular gas at the Texaco station across the road. We ran the gas for the next year or more and never had an issue. Back them it was common for camps in the area to have their own tanks and fill them once every couple of years. Try that with todays gas and you have problems.

That old IHC probably had a piston the size of a soup can and a stroke measured in feet rather than inches!

 

[RBHarter]

I had several of the cornbinders . 3.25x4 for the 345 and 3.378 x 4 for the 392 ......... That doesn't seem right but I do remember the 392 was "just" a .128" over bore . All of the engines from at least 1965-1980 shared parts . They were all either 304 or 345 from the rods and bearings out to the rocker covers .
Maybe it was 3.125 and 3.25 ........ Long time ago now .

 

[JonB]

in 1999, back when I was prepping for Y2K. I wanted to have 50 to 100 gallons of gas in my stash. I was thinking of a steel 55 gallon barrel. I talked to a few people, but most importantly, I talked to my insurance agent (ya gotta love living in a small town, where the trashman, real estate agent, Mayor, and insurance agent all meet at the local bar at 5pm, before heading home...you get all kinds of info from them at the bar)...anyway, my insurance agent talked me into buying 5 gallon gas cans, He said if I had a fire and I had 50 to 100 gallons of gas in my shed, in a non-spec container, I may have a hard time collecting on my home owners...but if I have 10 or 20 cans (5 gallons cans) full of gas, and the cans were spec'd for gasoline, NO PROB.

PS, I still have several of those 5 gallon cans...I sold a few...I gave a few away.

Thanks my 2¢

 

[fiver]

the 345 has a longer stroke than the 304 but the block is wider.
you tell them apart by measuring the back of the engine between the heads on the block tabs there.
the 345 is 7-1/2"s
their HP output is 5 apart but the 345 has 100 ft lbs more torque.
their max rpm is 3800, and you time them on number-8 not number-1.
the only parts that interchange between the 304 and 345 are the water hoses and housings for them, and the exhaust manifolds.
many of the truck and scout parts are different.
for example the oil pans and pumps are different, even in the same engine size, but you can swap them over if you switch the pan/pump/and pickup tubes.

you can swap parts between the 392 [really a 383] and the 345.
the heads [if from the same cooling type, there were 2] intake manifold, the distributor, oil pumps [if from the same type of vehicle] water pumps, belts, hoses [if from same type of veh.] alternator is Chevrolet, power steering pump is too, but with different mounting holes.
auto transmissions are dodge 727-A but not the same bolt pattern just internally.
distributor caps and rotors are Ford, except the electronic ones they are all IH but are the Hall system similar to Chevrolet.
fuel pumps are Chevrolet type.
axles are Dana, brakes are usually Chevrolet type but can also be Dodge.

wiring is straight up brown and green or brown with green stripe or green with brown stripe or brown with black stripe or green with black stripe with the occasional yellow or yellow with black stripe thrown in to liven up the color wheel.

 

[Ian]

I been through the stinkin' 345s first and last, you aren't kidding it's a cluster. Two distributors: Prestolite and Motorcraft. There are four pages of timing curves in Chilton's. Yeah, you time off of #8, that will blow your mind the first on you do if you don't know! The intake gasket sets FelPro sells now come with gaskets for both deck heights, and if you're stupid like our local ISD mechanic is and put both sets on the same engine, it will block half the intake ports off and make it run really, really, really bad...but still manage to run if you milk the throttle just right. Doing a valve job is real fun, like all the arbor shaft setups you'd better pay attention grinding the tips or it will clickity-clack down the road. IH and Jeep in the '70s were a nightmare of bastard parts, and some of us are lucky enough to still be working on them

 

[fiver]

many days I wish I still were.
I unloaded my lifetime collection of IH's including all the brand new spare parts I had almost 2 years back now.
I had a 18' travel trailer chock full of gasket sets, heads, intake manifolds, doors, hoods, new oil pumps, hoses, belts, radiators, a couple of rear ends and front ends, new brake shoes, u-joints, distributor parts, plugs/wires, a couple of distributors, some gas tanks, window cranks, and regulators, seats, windows, brake parts, master cylinders, rear springs, new shocks, some starters, a couple of engines, a couple of new rotors for the scout-2, a pair for the 1/2 ton pickup, weather stripping, badges, door handles, locks, drive lines, and transmissions,, etc..
I probably could have just about built a brand new pickup or a new scout out of everything I had in there.

 

[Bret4207]

I had several of the cornbinders . 3.25x4 for the 345 and 3.378 x 4 for the 392 ......... That doesn't seem right but I do remember the 392 was "just" a .128" over bore . All of the engines from at least 1965-1980 shared parts . They were all either 304 or 345 from the rods and bearings out to the rocker covers .
Maybe it was 3.125 and 3.25 ........ Long time ago now .

The days of long stroke, relatively low rpm engines are pretty much gone.

 

[Bret4207]

wiring is straight up brown and green or brown with green stripe or green with brown stripe or brown with black stripe or green with black stripe with the occasional yellow or yellow with black stripe thrown in to liven up the color wheel.

Nice when they make it easy on yuh, aint' it? Maybe they had an ex-pat Brit that formerly worked for Lucas Electrical in the design dept....

 

[Rick]

I used to be a grease monkey and spent over a year at Winnebago dealership. They built for several years every wire in those things were purple, zero color coding. The entire coach is strapped with wiring harness's and every wire purple. Nightmare time. The only thing I could ever imagine is that Winnebago got a hell of a deal on purple wire.

 

[Pistolero]

We can buy no ethanol in KS for about 30-40 cents a gallon more, several stations nearby
have it. I use it in all the small engines now, sick of the carb corrosion crap.
I have had good results for two or three years storage with Stabil, no carb issues, but with
no ethanol fuel. Maybe worse with ethanol blended. Will look at Phaze...stuff.

Bill