Quality of Australian Fuels

In the vein of what Lang posted, I always recommended to the people who bought tractors from me to always fill the fuel tank at the end of the day, instead of the morning, particularly after a heavy days work. Reason being that the fuel left in the tank was hot from return and as it cooled overnight, condensation would cause a build up of water. Memory tells me this was a recommendation of Caterpillar in the past.

Hardly surprising...at BP Eagle Farm,labourers getting $90 an hour for confined space in a tank the size of the opera house........In India ,$2 /hr for stripping out asbestos.

Water is very easy to get out of fuel and treatment just means draining and filtering. The huge filters you used to see on aircraft refuelling trolleys (and probably still do) catered for any water and I can remember two litre jars of water coming out on the daily morning checks. They had to keep these jars plus the first pure fuel one properly identified for I think 7 days in case there was an accident.

When I was flying a little plane through India I landed at Nagpur but they had run out of fuel. Anyhow after a lot of wheeling and dealing I got them to start on the pile of about 500 empty 200 litre AVGAS drums. A cast of thousands worked for 3 hours getting anything from a cupful to nearly a litre plus heaps of water out of each drum into buckets then into the Indianoil tanker. Indians being Indians we soon had the Indianoil chemist on site with all his test gear. When I got my required 300 litres into the tanker truck they cranked it up and started circulating it through the big on-board filters. A little bloke squatted under the truck and released water (which made up about 50% of the contents) every few minutes. After half an hour continuous circulation no more water was coming out so the chemist came over and with his various pippets, vapour testers and litmus papers declared the fuel fit for use and the manager signed the release for guaranteed aviation spec fuel. Off I went into the wild blue/brown yonder and didn't even crash.

Years ago I were using bought from servo drummed mogas in an aircraft. Started using it in summer with no issues. Early winter and I got carb icing on days that I shouldn’t have. Turns out the servo’s (or supplier ?) in that area put a fuel additive in for winter. Back to avgas and no more issues.

Year back me new Ducati bike has failure to start issues. Talked to Ducati service and were told to only use 95 as the other fuels vary in quality. Drained me tank out and filled it with 95 and the bike soon started and I have not had an issue since.

I always use fuel doctor in my Merc motorhome. Don’t know if it actually works, but I’ve had no issues in 3 years, (touch wood). It has a plastic tank and I always fill tank before parking up for a month or two.

Thinking about this I reckon the expression "Fuel Quality" is a crock. We even use it when we say 98 is better quality than 91 which is patent nonsense..

The "quality" of our fuel is absolutely up to world standard. It is clean, consistent in mix and monitored up to world's best practice.

It is the recipe or formula we are talking about. Our formula is lagging behind various legislation in other countries most of which has nothing to do with "quality" or "performance" and is purely related to emissions. Much of those new fuels would have been branded "poor quality" in days gone by. As a result vehicles have been produced to use these new fuels and some necessary modifications have made them incompatible with older formulae.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with our fuel when used in vehicles designed (or adjusted at the factory) for older brews (everything on Australian roads). We are getting cut out of the loop by particularly EU legislative changes forcing unwanted design changes on manufacturers and unless we update our formulae, not quality, we will become more restricted in what is now our only choice of fully imported vehicles.

Lang

Righto, Lang called me out for being a fb expert and I ducked and watched the action. And so it has come back to the sort of thing I thought I was referring to, which is: is it possible that Bosch are recommending a grade of spark plug on the assumption that it will be used for the most updated formulae.