Engine Problems

[TonyG]

Mark,

Good to hear you are working on the car again and encouraging for me to get back to doing mine!

I've written about this before, but I cannot stress how important it is to drain the old fuel from a car that hasn't been used for a while and put in some fresh petrol. This will have a huge impact on starting and subsequent smooth running.

Shelf life of modern unleaded fuel is just a few months in a sealed can but much less in an open vented tank like Rover used on our cars. If you compare old and new petrol you will see that it becomes very yellow as it ages. It's ok for longer in lower compression engines so I use the old stuff in my mower. However, it gets to the point that even that won't run on it!

My Tourer is a nightmare to start on petrol that's been in the tank more than 2 months, but that is higher compression than standard. I get around it by extracting the petrol from the float bowls using an old turkey baster and replacing with new stuff. Then, assuming the tank is almost empty, putting in a couple gallons of super unleaded and letting it mix. Once started it runs fine.

Oh for the days of 4 star without all the additives and ethanol we get now. Petrol lasted years back then....

Tony.