Thread: Strange grit-like substance in carburetor

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I will give you guy an idea how corrosive the ethanol is.
We have site glasses where we can see the fuel going in and out of the tank when we load or unload the tanker. With-in two weeks of starting to add ethanol to the fuel we had to replace all the site glass and gasgets. The gasgets got ate up and the site glass which was made of plexie type glass all craked and were braking apart. Now we use real glass and metal gasgets instead of the paper gasgets we had usd for years. The metal gasgets even needs replaced every six months or so now. So the ethanol is some bad stuff. The Sta-Bil will definetly help, my buddy runs a yard were folks store their motor homes and they all use that Sta-Bil and they don't have any problems.
Unfortunatly for my Vette carb I found out about Sta-Bil to late, it's all ate up inside.
Oh and I hate to say it but not all of the tanker drives get their blends right so you could also get what we call a hot load with more ethanol then it was supposed to have.
I know this because thats what I did for years when I was not training other drivers. I would go around trying to fix other drivers mistakes or pumping tanks out that could not be fixed.
Kurt

E-10 is a problem. We started seeing problems a couple years ago on boats and the manufacturers of the outboard and inboard motors started sending out advisory after advisory, warning that we were going to see it get worse as time went on. At first it was just that fuel got gummy after a short time sitting. It used to be that 6 months or a year without stabilizer was no problem, but we were seeing carb plugging after only 2-3 months. Customers were irate and saying we were not rebuilding their carbs correctly, so we posted the letters from Mercruiser, Yamaha, OMC, etc on the wall so they could read it for themselves.

Then, after a while we started seeing more serious problems. We were finding strange looking stuff in carbs and fuel injection systems. Fuel related problems became the number one repair we were doing on a daily basis. One customer was towed in with a boat that he had installed a new poly tank in only two weeks earlier, and the inside of the tank looked like it was sandblasted. Particles of the plastic were found in the entire fuel system and carb bowl. That was not an isolated case, we were also seeing aluminum and (especially) fiberglass tanks where the insides were dissolving or being pitted.

I've had lots of conversations with the Tech guys at all of the major boat motor manufacturers, and none had good things to say about ethanol fuel, or had solutions to fix the problems in older engines. Their common reply was "Tell your customers to expect more frequent fuel system repairs than they have ever seen."

Supposedly, cars built after something like 1980 are ok with the new fuels, but since we rodders use lots of older parts maybe that is why we occasionally see what is being described here.

Don