Bad Fuel = No Idle

[jordankjcm]

I learn something everyday.....this weekend's lesson was that my newly rebuilt T245A doesn't like gasoline with ethanol blended in it. I needed fuel to make to to my friend's place and didn't have enough in the tank to make it to my usual non-ethanol gas station, so I figured "What can it hurt to put 5 gallons of Shell into the tank?" FIlled a 5 gallon can of that stuff and brought it back to the truck and pooured it in. Fired right up and drove down to the end of the street, where it proceed to die at idle. Restarted it with a little throttle and it ran kind of OK. Not like before, when it was purring like a kitten. Thinking it could have been a fouled plug or two (I had replaced the plugs the day before), I put the old plugs back into it. Still no idle. So absent of a carb issue (and that was remote as I installed a M Series rebuilt carb w/ two fuel filters), I was stumped. I checked for vacuum leaks and didn't find any and my distributor was a freshly rebuilt (by M Series as well) with Petronix installed, so the odds that it was a faulty distributor were diminished as well. So I let it sit overnight and restarted it the following morning, thinking that if it were a heat related issue (coil/condenser), it should run fine when first started. No dice, still no idle. The only thing left that I changed just before the issue was putting gas into the truck. So I drained the tank and dumped all the fuel from the lines, and poured 5 gallons of non-ethanol blended mid-grade (that's all they have) into the truck. After priming the gas line, it fired right up and purred like a kitten at idle, just like it did prior to putting that lousy E10 gasoline into the truck. I was amazed that the fuel quality/type would make that difference in the performance. Lessons learned...never take a short cut on gasoline.

[Cal_Gary]

A good lesson for all-thanks for sharing!
Gary

[Rich]

I gave up on ethanol fuel 5 years ago. I use only ethanol free fuel.
The web site Pure gas.org has local sources of ethanol free fuel.

[jordankjcm]

Well I will never use E10 again in the truck. Here is another site that I use which uses data from pure gas.org site. Just in a different format. I like pictures!!
http://www.historicvehicle.org/Resource ... re-Gas-Map