A month ago a person in the next town over suffered first and second degree burns on his ankles and inner thighs when he poured a mixture of old oil, gas and diesel into hot coals to get the brush burning.  Flames followed the fuel stream back to the can, exploding the container throwing burning fuel onto his lower body and just missed his face.  Never even burnt his pants, just the tremendous heat.  He was one lucky guy.

had a neighbor who wanted to borrow charcoal lighter fluid to light the grille. I didn’t have any. so he used gasoline from his boat can....  no one injured, but he learned the message.

One of the best ways to get rid of unwanted gasoline is to drain it into some kind of bucket, container, metal pan, etc. and just put it outside to evaporate. Leave it somewhere where it won’t get tipped over and spill out accidently and forget about it, by time you remember it again, it will have magically disappeared and your container will be ready for the next batch of old gas. Not sure if this will work for diesel though, but gas evaporates pretty quickly.

Highbeam - 29 April 2008 11:35 AM

I consider gas to be “bad” when it reaks of foul stale fuel. If you don’t know the smell then you’ve never smelt it. It is a distinctive spoiled gas smell.

I think my wife must be running on bad gas. 

“You” can pour diesel straight out of a can right into the fire. I’ve done it and it works great with very predictable combustion. Same with oil. NOT with gas.

I learned pretty quickly that starting fires with gasoline only works well if the slash is very dry already but I will always use diesel or propane before gasoline.

Ya, gasoline is too flammable to be used for anything but an internal combustion engine.  Fuel oil is much more controllable, but will make your burgers taste wierd.  That black mushroom cloud is cool to look at, but not very kind to the environment.

A gummed up carb is a PITA, but I don’t like to run a 2 stroke dry as you are depriving the engine of lubrication while you are doing it.  I usually dump the fuel out of the tank after warming up the engine, start it up again and go to full choke to pull the rest into the engine.  Kill the ignition when it starts to die, fog it with something like WD-40 and put it away.  I don’t seem to have much of a problem doing it this way.  The Stihl gets used at least every couple of months and doesn’t seem to have a problem with 6 month old gas.  I usually dump the old gas/mix into the wagon with a 20 gallon tank and it also doesn’t seem to mind.  I usually run a bottle of isopropyl through each car in the fall to suck up any moisture that condenses in the summer and keep them full when the humidity is up.

I just dumped the gas in the bike into the cars this afternoon as I couldn’t remember if I added stabilizer or not.  It seemed to really like the fresh gasoline.  I guess the problem with putting away an engine “wet” is that you will have bad gas along with an engine that hasn’t been started in a while.  Fresh gas really helps out here.

If it is really old and nasty, it goes into my waste oil container.  Not sure if the recycler likes this, but it all gets burned anyway.

Chris

i keep 20 gal every winter for generator use, whatever i dont use in march goes in my truck and burned up in a few days than replace the gas in the cans