The Walden Effect: Farming, simple living, permaculture, and invention.

ATV fuel system revitalization

START engine help

The ATV was beginning to have trouble starting from a cold stop.

I knew the previous owner used fuel with ethanol, and it was in his garage for at least a few weeks like that, which lead me to suspect that as the problem.

Start is a fuel system revitalizer made by the people who make STA-BIL. It took a few days before I started seeing results, but it seems to have improved starting.



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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.



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Found the MSDS sheet, Isopropanol, Butyl Methyl Ether, and Xylene as a fuel system "revitalizer." By content mostly ether carried by alcohol and xylene.

Looks like that alcohol fuel made it into your tank again.

Comment by Clever Survivalist Wed May 15 21:17:13 2013

At a guess, the isopropanol ("IPA") is used to remove water from the fuel system. The IPA mixes well in the methyl tert-butyl ether ("MTBE").

Ethers carry an oxygen atom, reducing CO during combustion. Ethers like these have a low autoignition temperature which helps to start a cold engine. MTBE autoignites at 224°C but isn't prone to form explosive peroxides in storage like diethyl ether is.

The xylene is probable mostly responsible for doing the cleaning.

Comment by Roland_Smith Thu May 16 13:29:52 2013





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