I went to fill up my old truck at a big new gas station out on Hwy 99 near the airport, and was a bit surprised to see this pump among the others. Leaded? I thought that had been banned decades ago. Maybe my ’66 F-100 would like some of that, to remind it of the good old bad days.
Ah; that explains it. Racing fuel, for off-road use only. Of course, one could just fill up cans and pour it one’s car or truck, but at $8.399 a gallon, that would be a bit pricy. Still cheaper than some parts of Europe, though.
Av gas still contains lead. The regulators have been wanting to ban it for years, but the US aviation industry has been able to fight it off.
It should be banned. Lead causes developmental disabilities and other maladies. Lower crime rate? Thank unleaded gas and increased awareness of the dangers of lead paint for that one.
The number of piston-powered airplanes in the air at any given time is vanishingly small. Most are owned by people who certainly aren’t rich, and FAA-certified engines are not cheap. It’s not a huge market (there are less than a million licensed pilots in the US and most don’t own their own airplanes) so there won’t be a lot of volume to spread the R&D costs to develop new engines.
There’s a lot lower hanging fruit for the environmental regulators to go after.
It’s uncanny. Here’s a graph from C&D.
A friend of mine had a job in college (late 60’s) where he went and took samples of the ground and water near busy roads in NW Ohio/SE Mich, and he said that some of the amounts of lead in some of the samples was scary high, and he would see a lot of little kids playing on the area the sample was taken from. One of the highest was right near where I lived. I always wondered if the lead was what made the three kids that lived along that road as crazy as they turned out to be. All three of them have been in trouble with the law and have bad impulse control. The middle one just got into trouble for scamming people by selling them good carpet, and installing junk carpet. His wife was the only reason he didn’t get into more trouble when he went after a reporter that asked him “Why are you scamming people, Mr. XXXXX?”. His wife basically drug him into their car.
I don’t remember what company it was my friend worked for, but of course, it turned out to be owned by one of the big oil companies.
The effects of environmental lead are noted in the aggregate expended. With virtually all volume usage of internal combustion fuels now unleaded, the minuscule amounts that emitted by specialized users, that is civil aviation, autos over forty years of age, or motorsports use, would be virtually unmeasurable. Why must the environmental advocates take an otherwise prudential course of action (reducing lead in the environment) and turn it into zero-tolerance religious crusade? BTW, I was born and raised in LA during the peak of the lead graph illustrated, and somehow, most of my friends and I managed to avoid severe brain damage. I’m told I did enjoy munching that white paint on the sides of crib when I was teething, though.
Industry has been looking for a plug-in replacement for leaded aviation gasoline for a long time. Large bore air cooled engines with open chamber heads (no quench) and fixed timing magnetos, especially turbocharged ones, need a high octane fuel so as not to detonate and self destruct under take off and climb power. Dual ignition helps, but not enough for unleaded automotive gas. Ethanol blends wont work because they are hygroscopic and subject to phase separation at high altitude.
Finally, there is progress.
http://www.avweb.com/blogs/insider/Avgas-to-the-ForeAgain-222365-1.html
Wow! That looks like good stuff for my antiques! But it is a bit on the expensive side, so I guess I’ll just stick with unleaded premium. (Would be nice yo get dome fuel without the ethanol, also!)
The Citgo gas station over the hill from my house sells both off road diesel (red dye) and no ethanol gas (for boats and other off road uses). One is a lot less, the other slightly more.
I drive my Deere 790 utility tractor to the station every other week.
There are two places on Leeward Oahu (City and County of Honolulu, HI) that sell ethanol free gasoline: The Pearl City UNOCAL 76 station and the Waianae 7-11 near the Post Office (Aloha Gas “Classic Unleaded” they call it). At current, both are around $4.40 a gallon. I will top off my 2010 Ranger pickup or 2007 Mustang with these – a little more ‘oomph’. Both are rated at 89 octane. The Waianae Aloha 7-11 is perfectly poised for boaters especially as the big 3/4 and 1 ton trucks that pull some of these boats will pull in and fill up their boat tanks with the 89 octane ethanol-free gasoline (Aloha’s “Classic Unleaded).
Are these octane ratings research plus motor divided by two or ? What is that 100 stuff? Here we get a multitude of stuff, 85 octane {(R+M)/2}, 87 ethanol, maybe 85 ethanol, 88? ethanol, 91 ethanol and some pure 91 gas. My turbo 4 likes the 91 pure gasoline.
In the US it is (R+M)/2. In OR you can only put non E10 in vehicles 25 years or older and it only Premium can be non E10. Since the octane is so high on this stuff I’d be that it is sans ethanol.
Ethanol (pure) is 113 octane, so adding it to lower octane gasoline raises the octane level. Generally 87 octane regular with 10% ethanol added is about 88 or 89 octane Plus.
110 low lead. it’s what Cessnas and the like use
When I was flying (eons ago) I thought Cessnas used 80, but the 182 may have used something else.
No one carries leaded 80 anymore – it’s all 100LL (low lead) except for some really high performance pistons that need 115/145.
STCs to let lower performance piston engines run on automotive unleaded gasoline used to be popular, until E10 became nearly universal. Ethanol blends are not permitted in aircraft as ethanol pulls water into the gas.
No one has made 115/145 (purple) for decades. Once the military and the airlines went all jet and turboprop, demand went away. Warbirds and vintage airliners use 100LL with the superchargers disconnected for de-rated power, good enough for low payload demo flights at airshows.
The alcohol does disperse the water, but the really bad thing is with enough water, the water and alcohol precipitate out leaving the low octane gasoline. So an 87 octane E10 would turn into 84 octane gasoline. Probably worse though is that the ethanol and water would be the first out of the storage tank. So this is why I try to avoid E10 as much as possible.
Lets say the alcohol has absorbed a certain amount of water in the fuel tank of an airplane on the ground. If it was pure gasoline, the water would have been drained out of the bottom during the preflight check.
Take off and climb to an altitude where it is much colder than at the airport. Water saturated alcohol now separates from the gasoline and settles to the bottom of the tank and gets sucked into the engine. Now you happen to be clearing a mountain pass. Not good!
E10 at 60 F will begin phase separation with a bit more than a table spoon (1.25) per gallon. This is about 3/4 cup per 10 gallons. At 20 F below zero E10 will separate at half this amount.
What the flip, why has gas with Pb not been fully banned!? Not gonna lie if I owned an old vehicle I would be tempted to put some Pb laced fuel in it just to try it out. Though can you mix gas with Pb and gas without Pb in one tank or will it kill the engine?
In regards to Octane ratings I know that my 95 Voyager did not like the 5-6 gallons of 85 Octane I put in her since she had been running on 87 Octane (sometimes higher) for 18 years. At start up there was a bit knock that quickly went away thankfully, but she felt a bit sluggish. So I filled up with 88 or 89 in Las Vegas, Santa Fe, and Roswell to flush the 85 Octane out of her system.
In any 1974 or later model year vehicle, the leaded fuel will kill the catalytic converter. Originally, tetraethyl lead was added to gasoline to boost the octane. There were a few ways of boosting octane: 1. add lead, or 2. add an oxygenate (like ethanol). GM and Standard Oil of New Jersey (Exxon) went the leaded route back in the 1920s. Now, we use oxygenates (ethanol, MTBE – which, BTW is banned in places now, ETBE).
As for that 85 octane fuel, that’s usually in the inter-mountain west due to the elevation, and even now, it really was more for use in carburetors than in modern fuel-injected engines.
Good points and the 2013 Chevy Express I drove in Montana had no problem with 85 Octane.
Yes modern fuel injected engines really need 87 to around 10,000 ft.
Well that would help explain the Plymouth’s issues.
87 is required in owners’ manuals too.
Just being picky, but it was the 1975 model year when unleaded become the norm, for 99% of new cars. Some were still running leadaed, such as Lean Burn Mopars and some CVCC Hondas. But soon, these were gone.
Yes, it will be 40 years of “unleaded only” this fall. And I agree that we are better off without lead in the air.
Leaded fuel doesn’t hurt modern engines (though with continued use it would probably foul the spark plugs), it’s the catalytic converters that can’t handle it. The lead reacts with the metals in the converter and renders it useless.
it also trashes the O2 sensors in short order.
I remember a local station having a CAM-2 pump and charging $3.59 for the stuff at a time when regular unleaded barely broke a dollar.
In the late 1980’s when I was driving my family’s hand-me-down 1970 Buick Estate Wagon with a 455 and a 10:1 compression ratio, I mixed leaded regular with unleaded premium.
In Europe, they were making cars to run on leaded gas as late as 1992. It was available in the UK as late as 2000, then “Lead Replacement Petrol” or “LRP” was marketed for a couple of years after that.
It’s one of the reasons I laugh when European writers get snooty and look down on the US as being less “green” than they are. Fools.
Ah, but there are two types of “ungreen” when it comes to emissions – poisoning pedestrians, and contributing to global warming. So it depends on your priorities 🙂
The UK has only had mandatory catalysts since 1993, and never had the restrictions on diesels the US had. But, our “road tax” on cars built since 2001, is based on carbon dioxide emissions, and fuel tax levels mean using an F350 to commute to an office job doesn’t make much financial sense.
Our fuel taxes increased every year from 1993 to 2000 thanks to something called the “fuel escalator”, which was introduced by the Conservative government in the early 90s, and still regularly increase.
It’s not that the U.S. has restrictions on diesels per se; it’s that U.S. emissions standards don’t differentiate based on fuel type. Passenger car diesels here must meet the same standards as gasoline engines, which can be tricky, particularly for NOx. ECE standards have separate tiers for diesel and petrol.
A station along my commute also sells such racing fuel. This made sense once I remembered that the Tucson Fairgrounds is down the road a couple miles, & it includes a drag strip. I’m sure all the enthusiasts know about it, too.
is the 110 considered Cam2?
There’s a gas station not far from here that has 100 pump octane unleaded racing fuel. The last time I looked, it was $9.999 a gallon, but I periodically see owners of (presumably highly tuned) turbo cars — WRX STI, Lancer Evo, et al — heading in and out.
I recall back when I still had my ’93 Audi S4, there was a 76 Station near my in-laws in Orange County that carried 100 Octane Unleaded. I tried it a couple of times and was impressed, however it cost right around $4/gallon which I found simply outrageous. Ah, the good old days!
I just filled up with 91 pure @$4.17/gal Prices were increased for Motor Cycle week.
Unleaded ethanol-free RON 98 gasoline, that’s the current premium fuel at a gas station nearby. That’s roughly AKI 94 in the US.
Across the border they also sell unleaded RON 102 as pump gas, as far as I know also ethanol-free. That would be roughly AKI 98 in the US.
Or you can always buy a can of Swedish Aspen racing fuel.
RON number are 8 to 12 points higher than MON, so I would guess that the 102 is probably 96, while the 98 may be 93 (could be 92).
I found a nice chart on Wikipedia.
BP Ultimate RON 98 = AKI 93-94. (that’s the stuff alright in my Plymouth)
BP Ultimate RON 102 (“now discontinued”) = AKI 97-98.
But its best part for an old car with a carb: ethanol-free.
I did not find a chart, but Wiki said the diff is 8 to 12. But refiners can refine gasoline to be some target RON number and they can make the MON number more or less what they like too within reasonable limits.
Here it is, scroll down a bit and there’s the chart, RON – MON – AKI.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Octane_rating
That is the page that I looked at. For the US and Canada the pump number is an average of MON and RON, while other countries may post the RON number at the pump. The MON number is 8 to 12 points less than the RON number, so the RON may be 4 to 6 points higher than (RON+MON)/2 but here in the US we don’t know exactly what either number is.
I wish this option had been around a few decades ago. Back then, at least here in BC, premium leaded gasoline was sold only at a select few Chevron stations. Even it wasn’t as high an octane rating as the good stuff from only a few years before. So we had to improvise.
A friend of a friend had connections at the local airport, which still had 100/130 Avgas and very occasionally 115/145 available during the summer to feed the very thirsty DC-6 and A-26 waterbombers that based there. For a price we could get a barrel or two of “drainoff” (gotta check those tanks for water contamination…). We’d mix it with Chevron pump gas and I seem to recall 4:1 pump gas/avgas was the sweet spot. Too much Avgas and you’d end up with vapour lock problems. How we didn’t blow ourselves up mixing or transporting this stuff is a mystery to me, but it did allow us to run the aggressive timing curve needed at the drag strip.
I probably would have been happy to pay the equivalent of 9 bucks a gallon to avoid all that hassle!
Haven’t seen leaded fuel anywhere for a long time, but when I lived in Savannah, GA there were a fair number of stations where I could buy ethanol-free gas being sold as marine fuel. Theoretically it was also not intended for road use but nobody cared that I was pumping it into a Corvair, except maybe for being surprised to see someone filling up at the FRONT of the car.
The tax man cares, because marine fuels don’t include highway taxes in the price.
that’s insane.
When I still had my 1990 Miata with the Flyin’ Miata FMII turbo kit, I found it was more cost effective to purchase 5 gallon cans of toluene from Sherwin Williams, at about $10 a gallon. One gallon of toluene (114 octane) for every two gallons of premium unleaded (93 octane in Pennsylvania) gives you 100 octane for a net cost of about $6 a gallon.
I wasn’t getting more power out of it, as it was dyno tuned using straight premium gas, but gave me piece of mind that if it was hot out or if I was working the car particularly hard, I had an extra margin of safety to keep the dreaded pinging away.
I don’t own that car anymore – I sold it before I moved to California as the FMII isn’t CA legal – but if I do ever own another turbocharged car here, I’ll be putting in a gallon of toluene for every six gallons of the 91 octane swill that passes for premium here. That should get me comfortably above 94 octane.
This reminds me of one of Honda’s F1 engines, which yielded almost 1,000 bhp from 1.5 liters through the application of really heroic levels of boost. Although fuel couldn’t be more than 102 RON, Honda discovered that the rules didn’t actually stipulate the composition of the fuel, only its maximum octane number. Instead of gasoline, they came up with a blend of toluene and heptane!
Joe, that is close to what 100LL Avgas is, before the lead is added, alkylate gasoline plus toluene. Automotive gasoline has other cuts beside alkylate for cost, drivability and evaporative emissions reasons.
Cheaper than regular 91 in NZ too.
Wow, you might think that is expensive, but up here in Canada VP C12 (leaded, non-oxygenated, 108 octane) sells for 23$ a gallon. Plus tax. U4.4 (oxygenated, 103) is 26$.
I think I would ride a bike before I gave 23 bucks for a gallon of most anything. Walmart used to sell (maybe still does) lead substitute that I ran through my 57. Lots cheaper than that. Built in measurement. One measure for tank of gas.
Legal for off road only and sure wouldn’t run it through a cat.
My 68 Satellite had never had the hard valve seats put in it until recently. You can get a concentrated lead additive from car parts stores & offroad vehicle places that works pretty well. Most places have diluted, 1 bottle per 20 gallon stuff – the concentrated lead was good for 15 tanks or so, 2 ounces for a tank of 20 gallons. It sure made fill-ups an ordeal though.
8.17 USD/gallon for reguler unleaded in Denmark today.
We have a station here that sells that stuff. I buy 5 gallons of it every fall to run in my snow blower , and then end up using the rest in the lawnmower over the summer.
The snow blower, or should say, 1967 Husky garden tractor with snow blower attachment, loves the high octane leaded stuff.
The exhaust smells sooo nice too, although it might explain some of my mental challenges during the winter season 🙂
That’s something I’ve certainly never seen before. Heck, around here I can’t even find anything that isn’t E10.