Snake oil or snake oil? Which one should I use?

[Red Lion]

Hi all, newbie here. Having just bought a Steamer I thought I'd get a heads-up on the woes and sorrows that might befall me by scouring through the technical threads here at TTF.

One recurrent piece of advice that crops up is the seemingly miraculous cures offered by the use of Sea Foam®. Out I popped to get me some, in an almost quest-for-the-Holy-Grail manner. Yay! $14CAD; the 'north of the 49th parallel gouge' is reassuringly alive and well!! 2 tank fills have shared the tin and I feel as though Mother Mary is swimming in my tank. Will she make my motor as tight as a virgin?

Objectively, my low-end and idle do appear to sound/feel a little smoother, though this may be entirely due to the fact that Tigz and I have been riding daily since I bought her. I'm not clear on how often Tigz's previous owner(forum member) took her out for a prowl, but I'd wager it wasn't daily. Placebo? Time will tell.

Yesterday I came across a tin of STP® Multipurpose Motor Treatment for $10 which had an almost identical product blurb printed on the tin as my Holiness, Sea Foam®. Grrrrrrrr! FALSE IDOLS offering discount to woo me: my faith shall not be shaken, methinks.

Overnight a weakness crept in and I found myself ogling MSDS's, much like a schoolboy sweating over an illicit porno mag. Interesting .... hmmm.

STP® is 90% hydrotreated light petroleum naptha, or to thicko's like you and me, aviation kerosene.
The remaining 10% is a fancy little juice called, diphenylamine. An anti-oxidant. Cool, this stuff can stop an apple oxidising as well as be used to isolate the apple's DNA. That's right, orchardists spray their apples with it to stop them going brown, and genetic scientists make lovely blue colours when extracting DNA samples with it.  

Sea Foam® has 3 juices:
Pale oil  -- 40-60%
Naptha  -- 25-35%
IPA        -- 10-20%

Bleedin' hell, I drink IPA!! This can't be right? Well, ...... it's not, or at least it's not the hoppy India Pale Ale that I'm so accustomed to, but another kind of alcohol; isopropyl alcohol to be exact!
Now, correct me if I'm wrong, but aren't some of our bretheren cursing the evils of blended gasolene, as in; gasolene + alcohol = bad for Tiggy's valves? Same, same? I know that it reacts with aluminium, but how aggressive it is, I don't know. Still, it's good for paint brushes at clean-up time.

"Pale oil" sounds quite bland, but only because it doesn't like to brag. Hydrotreated heavy petroleum paraffinic distillate is the handle our pale friend goes by, or paraffin for short. Interestingly, paraffin isn't too far from the kerosene family, in fact, they are really quite close!

"Naptha" is just another name for petroleum ether or benzine, aka: petroleum spirits. Anyone who has done a bit of painting/varnishing use this stuff to clean their brushes/spills. My guess is that laquered-up jets & needles don't like this stuff too much? On a more sinister aside, the Nazi's used to inject this stuff into inmates at concentration camps as an alternative to ........ let's just leave it there.

So with all this snake-oilery going on I have arrogantly decided that I can do better blend than the best, but at a fraction of the cost:

Diphenylamine -- 10%
Coz anti-oxidants are good .... right kids?!

Petroleum Spirits(Naptha, benzine etc.) -- 30%
Coz gummed-up/lacquered jets are bad ..... right kids?!

Aviation Kerosene -- 60%
Coz most pilots recommend having it in your tanks at 40,000' ...... right kids?!

On a serious note about my blend, I have omitted the isopropyl alcohol because it's only real advantage over Petroleum Spirits is that it deals with salt water in a better way than other solvents(for chemists, read up on miscible and immiscible properties), hence the Sea Foam® formula.

Now, all I need is a name for my magical snake oil! How about Red Lion Special Reserve?

[aeronca]

:shock:

[Yankee Dog]

umm. If I read you right, the naptha and the kerosene are both pertroleum sprits and both serve the same purpose. Maybe? ?one is more concentrated than the other?

Unless you are using the keosene as a carrier or just to bulk up the product, why not just leave it out and reduce the dosage to suit.

By the way. what dosage is recommended.

[jphish]

I'd use the venomous snake oil. I've used techron & seafoam - not sure I can sense any difference from my perch, outside the cyl or fuel injector. I'm in the "guess it cant hurt" school of skeptics, So use it every 5K mi or so. My tiggers usually / mostly used on long runs (2-3k mi or more) so not sure I really need it... But what the hell. For more infrequent winter use - I add Startron to counteract the alcohol storage woes. Works well. Your elixer may well be the new 'miracle juice' holy grail (Mary notwithstanding) we've all been waiting for.

[Red Lion]

umm. If I read you right, the naptha and the kerosene are both pertroleum sprits and both serve the same purpose. Maybe?

Yes and no ... ish ; the 2 naptha's referred to between the products each had their own CAS#, i.e. they were a distinct distillation crack:

STP naptha CAS# 64742-47-8 = aviation kerosene

Sea Foam naptha CAS# 64742-49-0 = benzine aka petroleum spirits aka petroleum ether

Remember, everything in the 2 products is a solvent, except for the anti-oxident(diphenylamine).

The paraffin in Sea Foam is the closer equivalent to aviation kerosene in STP's product, purpose-wise, and I suspect it is used to reduce the volatility of the more effective solvents used, i.e. the petroleum spirits and IPA.


As a rule of thumb; if you need a solvent that will mix well with water, then isopropyl alcohol is great as it is a polar compound. Oil-based(naptha etc.) solvents are less polar when it comes to water.

You need to determine whether water will be a factor in your fuel system. If you use your bike regularly and temperature extremes are less likely to cause condensation in your fuel tank, then skip the IPA.

If you lay your bike up over winter and expect condensation issues in the tank, use IPA prior to storage.

In arriving at the perfect formula there is a degree of "robbing Peter to pay Paul" when it comes to the solvents listed. The primary objective is to produce a blend of solvent that use the gasoline in your tank to deliver it to the carbs effectively. Miscibility and polarisation must be controlled to ensure this happens.

As an analogy, think of two-stroke pre-mix. It will separate if left unagitated for a period of time, as will water in any oil. Kerosene will 'carry' the the pre-mix oil in the gasoline, and IPA will 'carry' the water in oil more effectively.

[Red Lion]

Unless you are using the keosene as a carrier or just to bulk up the product, why not just leave it out and reduce the dosage to suit.

By the way. what dosage is recommended.

Au contraire, mon ami! This is where the snake-oil factor really comes in. If there is one single solvent to choose from, my money is on aviation kerosene. Don't look at it as merely a 'bulk-out' carrier. It is to a large extent what is effectively keeping your carbs tickety-boo & ship-shape.

I'm going to check on this, but I'm fairly certain that aviation kerosene already has an additive that deals with water more effectively than standard kerosene, as well as flashpoint additives etc..

[EDIT] No, the additive in aviation kerosene only lowers the freezing point of the water contamination, so it's a moot additive for our purposes.

What dosage? I would stick to the dosage per gallon/litre suggested by Sea Foam/STP, but less often.

[Spud]

I really would like to think i can understand a word of this, but suffice to say i cant  :oops:  . I dont add anything to my petrol er are we meant to.... cheers Spud  

[jphish]

Just as long as it doesnt cause my Girlies tiger stripes to prematurely bubble up...add what ever ya want to magic potion.

[metalguru]

If we take this one step further and give the Tigger an overdose we could be going back many years to a near forgotten fuel.

TVO (Tractor Vapourising Oil).

Most seem to use 20 octane, 28 second heating oil nowadays with great success.

Great breakdown of these 'additives' was always suspect of their usefulness.

But on the other hand......
If we could get the thing to start from cold, a mix of 4 galls heating oil and 1 gall petrol, we could have a cheap fuel but rather carboned up valves and somewhat depleated performance, it would smell nice though.

[Sin_Tiger]

I remember TVO but can't remember what I had for breakfast  :roll:

[blacktiger]

Over here we get petrol with all sorts of additives that are supposed to keep your engine bits clean. Shell V-Power is one such product, although I don't use it. So I'm in the "let the petro-chemists do the work for me" camp.

[Red Lion]

I've lived in your 'over here' most of my life, and believe me, I didn't know of such things as regular fuel filter changes until I came to my new 'over here'. I have to change my fuel filters every 5,000 kms on all of my cars/trucks/SUV's! Something to do with shite "gas" that is shipped over big mountains in a climate that has extremes -- like +40 to -40 extremes. Honestly, the petrol companies get away with murder on this side of the pond. I think the Albertans water the shite down with river gravel then transport it to B.C. in cement trucks! I'm starting to suspect that the petrol station's ground tanks actually double as the settling tanks for the municipality's sewage treatment plants.

[oxnsox]

... (edit)....! I'm starting to suspect that the petrol station's ground tanks actually double as the settling tanks for the municipality's sewage treatment plants.

That'll be why they put the IPA in then.... to help with the mixing...

[Red Lion]

Let's have a look at Profi Fuel Max


50-100% Petroleum Ether(Spirit) = Mineral turpentine spirit, or, white spirits. Solvent

2.5-10% Isopropyl alcohol(IPA). Good at getting water out of your fuel system.

2.5-10% Butyl alcohol, solvent, as well as fuel efficiency enhancer(when compared to ethyl alcohol).

2.5-10% Solvent naphtha, petroleum, light aromatic. This is basically a paraffinic solvent, and is found in most STP fuel additives

≤2.5% Mesitylene (1,3,5-Trimethylbenzene). Good for removing gum.

≤2.5% Xylene (mixed isomers). Heavy duty solvent. Good for enamel paint thinning.

≤2.5% Cresol. Commonly used in household cleaning products(Lysol etc.). Good at blending/mixing chemicals

≤2.5% Propylbenzene. Umm, not too sure about this one. STP use it, and so do some people to synthesize controlled substances. My best guess is that it is good solvent for cellulose acetate.

[Bixxer Bob]

So, looking at the percentages, you could mix the additives in an egg cup, add them to a full tank and get pretty much the same effect? Assuming the turps are just a bulking out agent to make you think you're buying more than you actually are....