I'm new to the list, and this is my first attempt at putting my oar in
the water -- Hope I get it right.. I agree with Art Kelly -- there's
way too much flap about unleaded fuel. In 1964 I bought a brand new MGB
(at age 26) and burned nothing but Amoco premium unleaded gasoline --
the only unleaded fuel you could buy at the time . As I recall , it was
a concensus opinion then that sportscars ran better "without all that
gunky lead", them being such exotic machines. Anyway, I put over 100K
Miles on that car before selling it in 1971 and never had any problems.
Then again, maybbe it was the Castrol oil (with castor oil ) that I
always used. Phil Bacon On Wed, 4 Nov 1998 17:11:12 EST
ArthurK101@aol.com writes:
>
>In a message dated 98-11-04 11:45:04 EST, you write:
>
>> We have a lot of correspondence in the magazine about unleaded fuel
> and
>> what we can do about it at present (the UK goes unleaded on Jan 1st
>2000 I
>> think) - Does anyone in the USA have any good advice about
>this?
>> My TR4 came from somewhere in Washington State and has valve
>seat
>> inserts. Are they likely to be what I need for unleaded fuel ?
>>
>> Brian Johnson
>>
>
>Brian, methinks you guys in the UK are making way too big a deal about
>unleaded fuel. ("The sky is falling" - courtesy of Chicken Little).
>We North
>Americans have been running unleaded fuel for years (since the late
>'70's, I
>think, although I was overseas for most of that decade.) I have heard
>very
>few "horror stories" about our older cars breaking apart or blowing up
>on
>unleaded fuel. And the few stories that I have heard were usually
>from some
>"nervous nelly" who didn't appear to know what he was talking about.
>
>What we do here is replace the valve seats with hardened seats when we
>rebuild
>the engines. If your engine was rebuilt in the US it probably has the
>hardened seats which will protect it from wear. But even if it
>doesn't have
>them, I wouldn't sweat it. It will take many miles and much time for
>the
>unleaded fuel to "ruin" your engine. You would probably wind up
>rebuilding it
>before then. When you do a rebuild just put in the hardened seats.
>Cheers.
>
>Art Kelly
>
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