Ethanol Fuel

New to this board. I am a long time all around mechanic, certified from the school of hard knocks. Also from buying broken down junk and turning it into somthing of value. My question and concern is, now that it looks like we are going to get Ethanol rammed up our keisters like it or not. Are there any good additives that are actually going to help with all the problems that go along with it??? Like hardend and degraded diaphrams, degraded rubber of all kinds, and the fact that it breaks down and water falls out of it. Also I have found a white gel like substance in outboard carbs recently that i have never seen before. I can only attribute this to Dirty, Rotten, and Stinking,,,,,,,,,Ethanol.

It is no where near as bad as some people would have you believe. Old motors need to have the rubber hoses replaced and rebuild the fuel pump. I have been running that stuff for over 12 years now (about12 different types of motors) and have had one problem that can be blamed directly on ethanol. And Merc put a TSB out on that a long time ago.

Totally agree - ran E-10 for a good number of years and have been running E-15 (coming to many gas stations near you in the near future) for the past two seasons, and likewise, have had zero issues that could be traced to ethanol (in fact, had zero issues).

The motors I run it in are mid-80's models with the newest one being a 1991 model.

I use no additives different than I did with regular unleaded - so only some stabil (or generic equivalent).

The ethanol gas will leave you with a cleaner fuel system than regular gas. The initial problems noted were when first switching over. The ethanol was cleaning the "crud" out of the system resulting in clogs, but once cleaned, if you always run fresh/stablized gas you are significantly "less likely" to develop a clog than running gas without ethanol.

The major drawback is that it attracts moisture and phase separates - stablizer and using the gas within 2 weeks drops the chance of that to near zero.

Ethanol is the new "catch all boogeyman" that is blamed for all the things that used to get blamed on oil injection (in 2 strokes).

I guess we always needs something to explain the faults with our outboards that couldn't possibly be caused by lack of maintenance on the part of owners who neglect their outboards

GALAMB, you said it! AMEN!!!

Dan

I read a really decent piece a while back (sorry to the author, can't remember the source or would give credit). It was trying to explain, mostly to an audience of (automotive mechanically inclined) why you must follow service requirements for outboards differently than what we practice with our vehicles.

He kinda put it like this - "you never ask your car to do the following" -

pick a nice weekend in September and just park your car at the far back of your driveway. Do no special prep work, just leave it there and forget about it.

On a nice day in May, go out and start it up (even if you need a boost to get it going). Then after it has warmed up for 1 minute, put it in drive. Don't touch the gas pedal unless you have to, to make it move, but under no circumstance allow the car to go over 5 mph.

Get it out onto the surface street and while maintaining a speed below 5 mph creep along to the closest freeway on-ramp.

Once you get to the ramp, put the gas pedal on the floor and keep it there for the next half hour.

After 30 minutes, hit the brakes, pull over and turn the car off for 1 hour. At the end of the hour, start the car, turn it around and again put the pedal on the floor until you reach the off ramp.

At the top of the ramp make your way home without exceeding 5 mph.

When you get home, once again park the car and don't touch it until the next long weekend that comes up.

Repeat the above process for the few long weekends over the summer.

Sound rediculous?

That's how we treat most recreational outboards.

Ask any auto mechanic how long they think a car would last treating it like that with no prep, no maintenance etc.

Why do we expect miracles from outboards?

Maybe if we drove our cars like that, then ethanol would be blamed for all their woe's as well....