Reg versus Premium Fuel experiament in 09 PT Cruiser
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From: Jim Yanik on 6 Nov 2009 08:03 Bill Putney <bptn(a)kinez.net> wrote in news:7lifjbF3ecc9bU1(a)mid.individual.net: > I bet most people aren't aware that today, lead is one of the powdered > ingredients in many brushes in the d.c. motors and alternators on our > cars. I was amazed to learn that when I worked as an > engineer/engineering manager in a brush manufacturing company > supplying 60% of the brushes to the U.S. auto industry. > > Think about it - lead in the brushes - brushes that wear and create > dust that gets blown about into the air. Who'd a thunk that they > would allow that - but it's a fact and you never hear anything about > it. Whyizthat? > perhaps the amount of lead emitted from alternator brushes is not significant,compared to that emitted from leaded gasoline. (BTW,I encountered my first steel wheelweight the other day.While out walking or biking,I pick up wheelweights I spot,and melt them down into ingots.One would not melt,even with a torch applied directly.Turns out it was steel.I didn't know they were dropping the use of lead in wheelweights.) -- Jim Yanik jyanik at localnet dot com
From: Steve on 6 Nov 2009 10:08 Matthew Russotto wrote: > In article <-NydnQPDm9rTim7XnZ2dnUVZ_sGdnZ2d(a)texas.net>, > Steve <no(a)spam.thanks> wrote: >> Also left out of the discussion is the fact the the VERY BEST motor oil >> you could buy in the late 60's wouldn't qualify as chainsaw bar oil >> today. Lubricants have come WAY further than engine design- at least in >> terms of bearings, rings, and other "hard" parts. Fuel managment systems >> have come as far as the oils or even further. If you could find a >> "pickled" (preserved, never run) factory engine from 1965 and put it >> into use with today's synthetic oils > > It would fail in short order without good old tetraethyl lead in the > fuel; no hardened valve seats in an engine from that era. Possibly. A lot of people have run a *lot* of miles without trouble. Unfortunately I wasn't one of them- lost a valve and had to put in hardened seats. Still made it to over 200k miles on that engine though.
From: Steve on 6 Nov 2009 10:10 Ashton Crusher wrote: > > What was found was that if you ran leaded fuel for a few thousand > miles it built up a coating that could provide protection for a long > time after that even if you burned unleaded. But if you took a new 66 > engine that had never been run and started it off on unleaded it would > burn the valves relatively quickly. That's why when leaded gas was > phased out there wasn't the problem people thought there would be - > all the already in service cars had been run on leaded for a long time > and the new ones had hardened valve seats. That's probably true. Plus hardened seats were snuck into production a number of years before the actual requirement. Chrysler started putting induction hardened seats in some engines around 1970, and lead wasn't finally eliminated until the 80s.
From: Steve on 6 Nov 2009 10:23 jim wrote: The simple fact is that in order to make a 60's engine > last as long as a modern engine you need to do a tune-up with the same > frequency as you change oil. OK, let's separate the problem here. Theres the hard mechanical parts of an old engine (rings, bearings, pistons) and then there's accessories (carburetion, ignition). The internal hard parts are not terribly different from today, but the accessories and lubricants ARE. That's my real point. I use a 1966 engine as a daily driver. I rebuilt it several years ago and went back to a very stock configuration in all regards. The biggest deviation from box-stock is that it has electronic ignition (a $100 investment and about 2 hours work) and that it has hardened valve seats in the head (which only raised the cost of the overhaul by about $50) It now gets about the same maintenance schedule as my wife's 05 PT Cruiser. I recently had an oil analysis done on both, and the old engine only had one wear metal that was higher (iron), probably attributable to the fact that it's a 7+ liter V8 with more than twice the ring-to-cylinder friction area and has the same volume of oil. Its copper and lead wear numbers were actually LOWER than the 2005. > Where is the evidence for these engines that burn or recess valves > without leaded fuel? (raising hand...) I had another engine (1966 383) that I converted to electronic ignition, but it still burned 2 exhaust valves. At the time I was doing a great deal of sustained high-speed driving with it. From the other old car drivers I've talked to and my own experience, sustained high speed operation is *much* harder on non-hardened valves than city driving. Especially if you're starting with a higher-compression higher-power old engine than something like a base slant-6 or 318. I had a third engine (1969 440) in a restoration project that didn't have any burned valves and still had great compression, but when I pulled the valve covers for some work (all the valve umbrella seals were rotted from age) and laid a straightedge across the valve stems, they were all at randomly different heights- lots of recession on many of the exhaust valves. So my quick saturday morning valve seal swap turned into a valve job and more hardened seats. Actually, it cascaded into months of work I hadn't planned to do for another year or so, but that's pretty typical for my projects it seems... ;-)
From: E. Meyer on 6 Nov 2009 10:41
On 11/5/09 3:56 PM, in article 1bd43wocta.fsf(a)snowball.wb.pfeifferfamily.net, "Joe Pfeiffer" <pfeiffer(a)cs.nmsu.edu> wrote: > jim <"sjedgingN0Sp"@m(a)mwt,net> writes: > >> Matthew Russotto wrote: >>> >>> In article <-NydnQPDm9rTim7XnZ2dnUVZ_sGdnZ2d(a)texas.net>, >>> Steve <no(a)spam.thanks> wrote: >>>> >>>> Also left out of the discussion is the fact the the VERY BEST motor oil >>>> you could buy in the late 60's wouldn't qualify as chainsaw bar oil >>>> today. Lubricants have come WAY further than engine design- at least in >>>> terms of bearings, rings, and other "hard" parts. Fuel managment systems >>>> have come as far as the oils or even further. If you could find a >>>> "pickled" (preserved, never run) factory engine from 1965 and put it >>>> into use with today's synthetic oils >>> >>> It would fail in short order without good old tetraethyl lead in the >>> fuel; no hardened valve seats in an engine from that era. >> >> That isn't true. There was a lot of concern about that at the time of >> the switch over from leaded to unleaded. But just like the Y2K scare >> that problem never seemed to materialize. I know a guy who put 300K on a >> '49 willies jeep after lead was phased out without any valve or ring >> problems and no increase in oil consumption. I myself ran a '66 chevy >> 283 for 20 years after lead was gone and didn't have any valve problems. >> The real issue was lead was a lot cheaper way to boost octane than any >> thing else. The scare tactic was just to keep lead in gasoline as long >> as possible and it worked. If the problem had been truthfully posed as >> do we continue to spew lead across the country only to benefit the oil >> companies, then it would have been eliminated 20 years earlier. the >> exact same thing can be said of MTBE. > > In fairness, Y2K was a huge problem, but it was seen coming just barely > far enough away that companies were able to put a huge amount of effort > in and fix (or band-aid) their code so that almost nobody outside was > inconvenienced. Had the work not gone into fixing it, the dire > predictions would have come true. You can't possibly believe that. > > Likewise my impression remains that the concerns about valve life were > real, and not just oil company propaganda. But while the concerns were > real, they turned out to be unfounded. |