Originally Posted by
Scrappah
There have been some changes in the gasoline over the years. Most of it is blended with Ethanol. In some states it's the law that they have to tell you it's blended. In other states they don't tell you if it's not required. As far as i know the fuel in Canada is blended as well.
I was talking with one of the sales reps from one of the larger oil companies a few years age. He said that it's only guaranteed to have a shelf life of 30 days from the time it was pumped at the gas station. Anytime after that it can begin what's called phase separation. It starts to break down into a low octane gasoline and high octane ethanol.
There's a testing kit on the market that measures how far gone the fuel is.
Looong story short .... I wouldn't recommend using the fuel out of a junker. If you dumped in a batch of stuff that had gone by it would be a major hassle. Maybe a day's work to drop your fuel tank and completely flush your fuel lines ? Maybe more if you ran into problems ?
The phase separation happens when the Ethanol absorbs too much water. Then like you said you have low octane gas and Ethanol mixed with water. I had about 7 gal that this happened to. My sidecar motorcycle has a flathead engine with 6.5 to 1 compression ratio. Due to the low compression it will run fine on fuel lower then 87 octane. I used the bad gas by adding it one gallon to about 4 fresh gas at a time. The only issue is this makes the engine run slightly richer.
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