ORIGINAL: locktite401
ORIGINAL: steve111
Also, in the early days, I was told to be very careful that you didn't lose any of that magical pixy dust known as ether. Somehow, your fuel could go stale and you would never, ever be able to start your engine on that fuel again. Never ever. You had to bless it with the addition of the ether that was obviously lost.
This is an interesting one. I've always tried very hard to preserve my highly volatile magical pixy dust, just as Andy says. Yet recently, I was at a friend's place in Brisbane and dragged out a PAW 249DS-powered model that we'd been flying this the previous week. On the off-chance that there were some dregs left in the tank, I choked it through a couple of times and flicked it. It fired instantly, and ran out the dregs.
Now this was a small quantity of fuel which had been sitting for 8 days in an unsealed tank, in a location where the daytime temperatures were up around 30C. By rights, there should have been no ether left and nothing much should have happened when I flicked it. Yet it fired and ran as if the fuel was freshly made. Fuel for thought, eh (so to speak)!
The's a phenomena with ether fuels that I've never seen mentioned on this forum. When you mix say 320 ml of ether with 200 ml of castor oil so as to make a Litre of diesel fuel you immediately lose 30-40 ml of the combined mix due (probably) to a partial solubility of the latter in the former. What actually happens is unknown but it seems to increase and decrease with changes in room temperature.
This probably goes someway to explain why the fuel level seems to change in stored fuel.
A friend tells the story of his Mills 1.3 cc diesel stored in a model with a prop on for about five years. He picked it up one day and flicked it, and it ran out a burst from what was in the cylinder.
Ray
That goes back to my question as to what happens when you mix ingredients. Especially ingredients that facilitate the mxing of a third ingredient, the kerosene. Do you get an entirely new molecule? Would that not generate heat if so? Or do you get a simple mixing of molecules. Or both?
Do racing diesels ever use synthetic oils? What's the result compared to Castor?