Ethanol in My Gas? NO WAY!

I have been wrestling with my aging car for over a year now. I rarely drive it and it sits for long periods of time between driving.

One of the reasons I drive as little as I can is to keep this car as long as I can.

I was a Shell customer for years. The reason was that I'd get 2-3 more miles per gallon with Shell than with any other brand in my early years of logging mileage. So, with this car, I tried to drive solely with Shell in the tank.

Then last year, I started having problems with the shifting of my transmission. It would start jerking and I thought... "On no! Another problem to deal with."

My car is a 1993 Buick Century Custom... A great car, runs quiet, has plenty of zip, and gets good gas mileage.

As I drove this car the last year, the transmission was getting worse, and then I noticed that I was getting oil leaks around the main gaskets. The car started running rough, and it was getting worse.

I tried to limp this beater as long as I could, but knew financial disaster was just around the corner.

The rest of the story.....

Then, one day, I noticed that the closest gas station started selling ethanol free gas. Then the lightbulb hit me. I remember hearing that older cars were not built to handle ethanol in their gas, and I remember the problems I had with internal swelling of gas lines in a Weed Whacker that I picked up at an auction.

I also remember making the mistake of putting regular gas station gas in my boat and the problems I had with that.

Could it be the ethanol in the gas that was drying out my gaskets?

So, around March this year, I decided to burn only ethanol free gas in my Buick to see what would happen.

It didn't take long for the oil leaks to disappear, but the engine still ran rough, and the rough running confused my transmission. (Which caused the jerking while shifting, I found out.)

As time went on, I decided that the plugs were fowled and so I put in some injector cleaner into the tank to see if that would make the engine run smoother. First go around didn't do much. But there was a little improvement. So I kept filling up with ethanol free gas when needed.
As time went on, the car started running smoother with less transmission shifting problems.

The car started running smoother, and two weeks ago, the car stopped killing when nearing a stop. (Confused transmission.)

The last two weeks have been miraculous. Not a problem with the transmission, the car is running smooth... in other words.. I got my car back.

I decided to go whole hog, and put in a bottle of "Sea Foam" to clean the engine as good as I could as well as stabilize the gasoline. Perfect!!!! I looked for the MSDS for Sea Foam and found out it contains "Naptha" and isopropanol. Now the Naptha comes in all kinds of flavors, it is basically a fraction tapped of during refinement of oil. It contains "nasties" like aromatic hydrocarbons which (if I recall right) was needed by the gaskets in internal combustion engines to keep them sealed. The aromatics swelled the gaskets to keep them tight.

My belief is that the ethanol in gas slowly extracts these aromatics causing the gaskets to shrink. The shrinking gaskets eventually caused leaks in the engine that fouls out spark plugs, causes oil leaks, and as I learned, messed up the shifting of my transmission.

I heard on the radio, that any car made before 2007 could not handle ethanol in the gas. Why 2007? Because it takes perhaps four years for the ethanol to extract and shrink head gaskets.

I wouldn't doubt that there is a car manufactured today that won't be damaged by ethanol in the gas. The ethanol will insidiously destroy an internal combustion engine with time. From 2 years to 4 years, depending on the design of the gaskets in the car. Thin sections will manifest leaking first.

So, my advice is to burn only ethanol free gas in your car if you want to keep it beyond 120,000 miles or three years, whichever comes first.

Nuff said... but much more I could say to support this theory. (I are a retired signtist...ya know.)