It’s a roundabout joke. Jason bought the solvent thinking it was going to be bullshit garbage, much like homeopathy. But it turns out it actually works, like cocaine!
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The MSDS for BG 44K Power Enhancer (likely the exact same stuff as the carb cleaner) says the only two hazardous ingredients are “Petroleum Distillates hydrotreated light, 15% to 40%” and “Mineral Spirits, 15% to 40%”.
They’re probably mixed with something like diethyl ether which is pretty commonly used as an engine solvent that burns hotter than gasoline.
So pretty much the alkane fractions with a portion of aromatics.
Diethyl ether would likely have to be listed in the MSDS. Has very high vapor pressure, and presents a significant explosion hazard.
It is an important question if it is there, as my suggested Viton rings would be attacked by it. (Hence also my suggestion for a real test. Compatibility charts and datasheets often won’t tell you the entire truth.)
A complimentary table of o-ring compatibility with different liquids is here:
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At 6:44 PM PDT on a Friday? Not bloody likely. I’m about to slide down my brontosaur tail and Yabba Dabba Doo my way out of here. I’ll consult your o-ring compatibility table after the pterodactyl screeches at 9:00 AM Monday!
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There is also historic criticism of homeopathy. Oliver Wendell Holmes gave a great takedown of homeopathy way back in 1842. Homeopathy has been known bunk since well before the civil war, and even before the discoveries of Semmelweis, Pasteur and Koch.
It is to our shame that homeopathy still exists.
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You know what? One of those cans of teflon is even better. Slicks everything up, don’t you know?
Liked for citing OWH, a reminder that in 2015 we have people more superstitious and ignorant than educated people in the 19th century.
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And that is one thing I’ll have to see with my own eyes and with someone else’s motor.
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The good thing is that it should be simplicity itself to discover whether sugar dissolves in gasoline or not. About 25 years ago, some unknown person poured a pound or two of sugar into the gas-hole of my 1978 Mercury Zephyr; I discovered it when I took off the gas cap at the filling station, and lucky indeed I felt for having spotted the offending white granules before I washed them down into the tank with fresh gas. I carefully drove home, dropped the tank, and discovered there were many baffles in the fillpipe that contained the vast majority of the sugar out of the tank proper. Cleaned it out and the car never gave me any trouble. I always felt it was because all the sugar was trapped in the pipe before it could get down into the tank and dissolve. Now I realize that some of it probably did get down there… but never did dissolve. In any case, as I said, my car was fine.
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You got chocolate in my peanut butter!
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The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table! Thank you for the link.
This is from an essay I wrote elsewhere:
…less than 200 years ago, the best medical treatment you could get was probably homeopathy. It was unlikely to outright kill you, and would keep you well hydrated. The next best treatment was almost certainly prayer (because it might have psychological benefits and at the very least it didn’t involve bleeding or the administration of poisons) followed by herbalism (which could definitely kill you, but might also heal you) followed by a dog’s breakfast of other therapies which mostly involved greatly increasing your chance of an untimely death in the name of healing.
Over time, the bits and pieces of things that actually worked (such as keeping patients hydrated, and various herbal remedies such as willow bark and etc.) became the basis of modern medicine, mostly through the efforts of snake-oil hucksters and patent medicine companies who found ways to profit from them. The profit-driven system has mostly worked rather well (despite numerous debacles like aspirin, thalidomide, Coley’s cancer cure, etc.) because you couldn’t make profit from dead patients (until the development of mass media campaigns, anyway).
Today the snake oil industry has metastasized into modern corporate medicine, which primarily exists to sell pills. But most of those pills actually do something, so it’s a huge step up from the days of homeopathy, when the last thing any sick person needed was any treatment that actually did something.
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Catastrophic failure is almost always fun to watch from a distance and most certainly if the film capture is slowed down so we can watch the bits and pieces emanate rapidly from the flaming areas. I think the Mythbusters’ general action plan, or a lot of it, is pretty much what I’d do if I won the lottery.
Besides, I hear a little sawdust in the transmission fluid lets you get a few extra miles…
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AFAIK sawdust in gearboxes was to conceal whine, but its other effect was to block the internal lubrication holes (and the gearbox oil pump if there was one) accelerating catastrophic failure.
But on those old vehicles with their sloppy tolerance catastrophic failure was often hard to achieve. I once acquired a 1960s Velocette motorcycle whose gearbox made a bit of a noise, so I dismantled it. When I pulled the layshaft out the end bearing inner came with it and the balls fell out. But three new bearings and it was as good as new.
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Looking at that chart the worst possible substance seems to be the innocent sounding l-propyl acetate. Something that attacks viton and ptfe, and yet smells of pears and is used as a food flavouring. And a new candidate for my favourite ester.
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I had a 50’ Chevy Deluxe back in the 90’s, and even when it was in
excellent working order it wasn’t hard to discern the moving bits from
their clattering around. It wasn’t pots and pans but it wasn’t a
philharmonic either, and the only thing that KO’d that glorious beast was a
failure to check the brake fluid level prior to operation. As we all know,
with no brake fluid comes great responsibility. [And yes, P, if you’d
checked the damn fluid level that car would still be rolling, but no. No!
Couldn’t lift the hood, could you, P? TO CHECK ON THE GODAMN ENGINE OF THE
40 YEAR OLD CAR BEFORE YA DROVE IT, HUH?]
Pardon.
A friend grew ↑ in Argentina in the 60s, and he would tell stories about
taking valves from old tractor engines, grinding them down to fit his m/c
(with no proper or large tools), and he said they would tear along until
that set blew up and then go find another old engine to cannibalize. It all
sounded a bit too Mad Max for my taste, but necessity is the mother of
infection or somesuch.
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Oh dear.
Velocettes had valves made of an exotic jet engine turbine blade alloy to cope with the heat, Nimonic as I recall. Not cheap. I have a feeling that with a tractor valve the only question would be whether when it let go it came out through the head or the piston.
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A friend owned a '79 Grenada which often bore the brunt of our many forays, whether on-road or off, and it rapidly developed a leak in the head gasket. Because of our youth and economic state, we bought a new head gasket and did the mechanical work ourselves, and I recall that once we’d gotten nearly all the bolts in the manifold and tightened, there was a gap between it and the block of about 3cm. No biggy, we just tightened the bolts a little more…
Of course, removing the bolts/manifold showed that we’d gotten a pushrod cocked in the hole, so we were torquing the manifold down onto the pushrod. Oy vey. Got it back in line, torqued everything, and the car ran like a champ (or, at least, a champ of a Grenada).
Between that car and a few 5k tie-down straps, much fun was had.
As for Velocettes, I had to stop at the BMWrs–I don’t need any more internal combustion addictions at the moment.
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A rule that works well for me is that if the things don’t want to go together smoothly, something is wrong.
Of course this leads to situations where I spend too much time where a solid whack would do the job. But it also saved me a lot of what-did-I-just-broke moments that can be way more time-consuming, so in net aggregate I believe I am saving time. Said whack is at the bottom of the list for that reason.
If you aren’t 100%-certain, every operation you do should be reversible. Application of force has a risk of making it not so.
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