Unleaded Petrol

GreenBlood

GreenBlood

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I don't seem to be getting good advise on the use of lrp in the old 74 D model cit. I guess the same applies to any of us driving pre 86 model cars in Australia.
Also I agree that we Citroen drivers are letting the side down when it comes to using this site, I for one am guilty of having a quick look and moving on if there is nothing new or interesting. Come on don't just CIT on your **DS21## lets get some chat going!!!
 
Hey cut down on that swearing
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Nah, well said
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Hi there Green Blood, small world hey?
My thoughts on this leaded, unleaded, LRP, Optimax etc is probably based on folklore & old wives tales, but I can remember when we got "Standard" & "Super" Fuel. The octane ratings were I think around 91 & 95 give or take a bit in fact at times the octane ratings would change from week to week & some oil companies would even advertise "added octane" fuel. I remember "BP with Methanol" & BP servos offering Methanol bulk; we actually used to buy it by the gallon (Now I'm showing my age) and ad it to the super petrol to boost the octane rating on our competition cars for rallying, motorcross etc. I recently tried to buy a few mils. to rid water from a carby & was told that I now had to have a doctors prescription if I want to buy it (apparently the p!$$ pots drink it); the fact it's in half the fuel cleaner compounds at multiples of the price apparently doesn't matter.
Enter Jap high compression engined cars; pinging, running on, knocking, over heating, burning out valves & so on, & all of a sudden we have to "boost" our octane ratings by adding lead so that the Jap stuff will run well enough for owners to stop complaining & slow the run of service managers contemplating suicide. We then end up with leaded & unleaded fuels. What most people did not realise was that the lead rating or % varied from state to state. (This information came from an Outboard Motor sevice school I attended)
Victoria was the lowest, WA the highest & Qld second highest with NSW second lowest, so imagine the cocktail you were putting in your car if you lived in Brisbane & went to say Byron Bay fairly regularly & filled up before you came home. (Gee! the cars running hairy Martha: Must be the sea air) Just prior to the phasing out of leaded fuel, I had a BX 16Trs which would run erratically (sometimes OK other times RS) on leaded & wouldn't run well at all on unleaded. I asked a servo owner why? The reason I was told was that the lead component had been almost removed & in fact all that we were being sold was unleaded with so little lead that it really didn't matter & in most cases we would be better off buying unleaded & just putting that in as it was basically the same stuff.
Based on the facts above, I changed to Premium Unleaded & the car went the best it ever had. In competition years ago it was the rule of thumb that the lower the octane rating, the slower it burnt, hence the hotter it burnt, so if you upped the octane rating or combustability then you got a bigger faster flame which didn't need its side effects covered by the addition of lead. In other words lead in petrol was a cheap option for the Japs not to have to rush to produce a motor to overcome the octane rating problem, something since rectified with the use of EFI systems whilst at the same time gave the ever money hungry oil corporations the chance to sell an inferior product at a high price.
It is interesting to note that OMC the outboard motor company stongly recommended AGAINST the use of leaded petrol in their motors due to the high incidence of corrosion they believed was caused via electrolysis due to the lead content whilst Briggs & Stratton would void a warranty if leaded was used in one of their I/C motors used in industry & agriculture.
My personal thoughts are that Premium Unleaded is a higher grade as well as a higher Octane fuel & will cause less harm than leaded fuel. With recent events of damage caused by oil companies new "green" diesel fuel, I have stuck with Prem UL on the CX's as I did on the BX & so far I have seen no bad effects; only time will tell.
Other peoples views on this may vary, but I think will at least be interesting.

Alan S
 
Thanks Alan.
I guess the problem I'm having is that we now have choices, the first issue is that we love our cars and don't look forward to expensive repairs by making the wrong choice.
I too tried Optimax, I thought it was great for a while but it seems to have gone off and the old D started pinging. Then we have these addititives at service stations with very little information either in writing or from the attendants. What are we putting into the fuel tank, is it a problem if we are refueling with different brands of petrol? I have not seen anything yet talking specifically about D model citroens as to whether they have hardened valve seats and what long term damage is being done. I had a look at the Shell web site but there is no information on there products.

Sorry GibGib I didn't know I was swearing.
 
GreenBlood, re: petrol consistent quality;
A few years ago I was going to Brisbane early one morning & pulled into a servo at about 4 a.m. to fill up. Price was good & top name brand. Got a few klms down the road when the CX started to play up big time; only way it would keep going was to flatten the accelerator & chuck into neutral, go till it slowed down & repeat the dose. This was real fun going over the Gunalda Range. Eventually, stopped in a very inconvenient spot & with semis whistling past at about 120kph, proceeded to strip carb & clean out. Short way again & problem reappeared. When I stopped, the exhaust had smoke coming from it (with engine stopped) which was pure white, like flour. In desperation we called in the RACQ guy at around 5.30 am as I was dolled up going to a medical appointment. He, complete with lit fag in the mouth, drained the carb, pumped fuel through pump into a container & declared the fuel was contaminated with "some clear stuff."
When I got home I asked around as to why I rarely saw trucks parked at this Roadhouse/servo which had replaced a popular truck stop due to a highway re-routeing & was told the truckies avoided him like the plague due to his "spiked fuel."
Someone referred me to a guy who was a former Oil Company executive who had retired in our area. His assessment; basically turps/paint thinner mixed in the fuel instead of dumping it (also duty free) & sold through the "Phantom Tanker" network. That is where brand name servos buy cheap petrol, often from competitor companies at a reduced price particularly during discounting periods with deliveries made between 1 - 5 a.m.
I asked if it was possible to know who had this crappy petrol & when. The answer was it turns up all over the place all the time.
His solution to the problem was to only buy fuel from Mobil servos because of the way they charge out their fuel, to stop operators from buying from outside sources. In effect, Mobil charges out the fuel as indicated at the pump not as in what is put into the tanks, therefore if a servo operator buys from a "Phantom" supplier, when next the tanker fills his tanks, he pays for it a second time thereby removing any incentive to buy elsewhere. So the moral of the story is to find a Mobil servo near where you live or work & constantly buy from him. Problem is; where I live there are 3 Mobil servos but none sell Premium Unleaded.
This is possibly the nearest thing to a solution to varying petrol quality, at least if you then notice a difference you can ask Mobil to "please explain !!" whether they will could be another story


Alan S
 
Hi there,

don't start me on dirty petrol. I filled up several months ago at a local Ampol Petrol station. I got about 2kms before the car stopped dead. Spent hours stripping the carby down, trying everything I could think of. NOTHING would get the car to run. In desperation I rang my brother and we pushed the car back to his house.

Went back the next day wasted some more hours, I was near ready to burn the bloody car. Finaly in desperation pulled the carby off another CX I own and installed it on the car. Great she runs!!, Only about 2kms to get home, ran OK for about 1km, primary choke full of crap, limped the other KM with the second choke wide open, that got me to the road I live in and I coasted the rest of the way home. Stripped down this carby, nothing visible wrong with it. However now I was home with some decent tools available, I blasted through all the jets with 100psi of pressure, there was a clear waxy film in them all that just looked like petrol.

Ended draining the whole tank, refilling it and have never touched Ampol **** since. Absolutly refuse to even pull into one of there petrol stations. I worked at this particular petrol station for 6years the car always ran like **** when I filled there, and for some reason alway liked Mobil. I mention mobile fuel to friends and they all reckoned there cars ran better on it to....Never did figure out why until I read above. Now I run nothing in my car but Shell Optimax, For the first time in years they all run properly and dont ping or run on anymore.

seeya,

Shane Leviston
 
Shane, did you report it to Ampol? A few years ago I had a customer come down from Ballarat in a Renault 16, he filled up at the Shell in Taylors Lakes (you probably know it), he drove about another K and it stopped, RACV towed it to us and we checked the fuel and it was as clear as water, he had just put 40 litres of water in his tank, we rang shell and they asked us to send a sample to them also the costs involved (towing and our invoice) and they refunded the full amount no problem, this was the old Shell half lead, they don't tell us what the other half is do they.
 
Hi David,

nah, didn't bother. As I'd worked for the place for many years and was on very good terms with the owners I didn't want to cause problems. Aside from that I had been asking them for a long time why the petrol there was such ***** *. Of course there answer was no-one else has any problems with it.... (other than my cousin who drives a fuego).

seeya,

Shane Leviston

PS: I'll take an R5turbo instead of the new clio
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then just a little tweak of the wastegate and............

[This message has been edited by DoubleChevron (edited 20 March 2001).]
 
Getting back to the original topic, has anyone ever used or heard of those silver things you drop in your tank to compensate for not having lead in the fuel?
They're a Pommie device which from memory are distributed by a motor cycle distributor & are supposed to last for yonks. Usually advertise in Unique Cars or Just Cars from memory. Saw a message somewhere just recently where some guy was raving about how great they were; he might of been a distributor. I've always been a bit sus of "hokus pokus technology" but I suppose some must work
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Alan S
 
I was talking to the bloke who dose all our head work and he says we shouldn't worry about unleaded in our cars because there have had alloy heads for over 50 years and valve seats and everthing else is so over designed that the lack of lead shouldn't effect them. What he says is the problem is the octane rating, unleaded is much lower than the super our cars love, unleaded with an octane boost will probably work but to be on the safe side us optimax. I've been running my R17 Gordini on optimax for a few years now and so far (touch wood) no problems, I dont beleave in dropping pills in fuel tanks either, might as well fit a polariser but I do beleave my head bloke, he's been in the game a long time and I've never found him to be wrong yet.
See Ya's
David.
 
David,
I live about 2 hours drive from the nearest Shell servo which I understand is who have Optimax. To go there is a bit self defeating as you can imagine. What is the Octane rating of Optimax & do you know what Prem. ULP is generally? We have a couple of generic brands in some of the independents around here; any of them likely to be the same as Optimax??
 
Alan, apparently optimax is about 98%, unleaded is about 92% and premium unleaded somewhere in the middle. The old leaded was something like 85 and dropping, I dont know much about LRP but I've read a few warning saying not to touch it apparently there is alot of problems getting it right. I heard Mobil have or are about to release there version of optimax (down here anyway) so I'll keep an eye on that.

David.
 
Thanks for your comments, it's reasuring if not comforting to see that I'm not alone on this one. Interesting to note that a similar debate is happening in the pug forum. The oil companies need to address this situation and better inform their customers of the appropiate use of their product range. Optimax is looking pretty good, in terms of octane, but should we still be using their lead replacement additives. I have seen somewhere on the web research that shows that the lead build up accumalated over previous years of using leaded petrol will serve to lubricate for 12-18 months, after which time using unleaded fuel will start to cause damage. I suspect too that the additives sold at servos may reduce the octane if thats possible, as it's only after using the additives that I have problems with pinging.

Love the Berlingo as it is GibGib
 
Re LRP

There was a lot of stuff in the UK CLassic car press when they introduced LRP there.

It seems that the main problem is incompatibility between different brands, particularly as you don't always know what goes into the petrol.

Different makers apparently use different materials - sodium or magnesium etc, to replace the lead (mainly as a lubricant replacement for the valves - not an octane raiser), and there are reports of incompatibility, causing problems.

We are comparatively lucky with Citroens from D's on, in that they will all run on unleaded, as they have hardened valve seats. My cars are however, much happier on Optimax - I have not tried any other High Octane unleadeds.

However my mother has an old Benz 230 which is most unhappy on Optimax - and for which we will have to find something reliable. So there are issues.

Paul Smith
74 DS 23 EFI BW Auto
74 G Special 1220
 
Regarding the Silver pellets you can use in your tank. I tried the version that sits in the fuel line but has the same effect. There was no effect on my bx16 valve. It pinked all the time. Now running on leaded 4 star available at only selected garages at £.99 gbp per litre. Not cheap. Only drive the car on Sundays now.

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My '74 D runs very nicely on Optimax. I was using Mobil lrp for a while but I will now stick with Optimax. I also have 2 '85 Renault 25 and the improvement in both performance and economy is especially noticeable with Optimax.
<font face="Verdana, Arial" size="2">Originally posted by Volcane:
Regarding the Silver pellets you can use in your tank. I tried the version that sits in the fuel line but has the same effect. There was no effect on my bx16 valve. It pinked all the time. Now running on leaded 4 star available at only selected garages at £.99 gbp per litre. Not cheap. Only drive the car on Sundays now.

Click to expand...
 
Hi Guys,

yep, my cars have never run so well since I've used optimax. Though it's quality sometimes seems to varie... Now if only I could get the )(*$@#$ timing right on my car I'd be happy.....

seeya,
Shane L.
 
Alan, a bit behind the times on this thread, but that mob in the UK that had a metal insert you stick in the tank (I actually think it was tin) have been busted by the advertising standards people because they can't justify their claims for the product, and there is no scientific basis for them either. Probably because not enough of the metal would diffuse into the fuel, I reckon.

Cheers

Stuey
 
Regarding tin products, not much does diffuse into the fuel, but over a few thousand kms this small amount may gradually build up on the exhaust valve until it is enough to become a useful combustion catalyst. Tin is a known catalyst, the question is really whether a useful amount does eventually build up on the exhaust valves. Lead is known to do this, and as tin is close to lead in the periodic table, it may well do the same.

I think tin products such as Fuel Star which use vibration and friction between tin cones to accelerate the wear of the tin, are more likely to form a build up on the exhaust valve because they are more likely to provide tin fast enough to offset the process of the tin wearing off the valve.

Products which just put tin in the tank, are probably not likely to wear the tin fast enough

Dave
 
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