Years ago I got a stack of magazine pages from my father; he had collected the columns from (Mechanics Illustrated? C&D? beats me now), the one where you write in about the problem your car has and they diagnosis it. That and a bunch of how-to's on car repairs/maintance. Mostly from the 70's. Plugs definitely suffered from lead deposits, and IIRC PCV systems would gunk up faster.
However, I have to wonder though about the PhD's comment, as motor oil has come a vast distance in the last couple decades. Production machining too, but oils are better, and EFI has not had a small contribution either. I'm not sure how one pulls apart those factors. Going into the 70's there was still a large number of large gasoline engines used in large trucks; and those engines were expected to last past 200kmiles, while under heavy load.
On a side note, aviation gas still has lead, and most piston aircraft aren't certified for non-leaded gas. Why is beyond me, probably because it'd cost too much to certify that x engine can go h hours w/o lead, then repeat z times. I do know that time between rebuilds is relatively short for those motors, so as to catch issues.
Shawn Upton, KB1CKT
Test Engineer
Allegro MicroSystems, Inc
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603.626.2429/fax: 603.641.5336
-----Original Message-----
From: TechNet [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Louis Hart
Sent: Tuesday, August 26, 2014 6:33 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: [TN] NTC - I believe ... (my credo)
About the time of the article you reference, Shawn, I remember hearing a radio story in 'Life on Earth' about the tetraethyl lead vs. ethanol contest. Kettering, the inventor of the self-starter, was involved for GM. The reporter or interviewee made one statement that still rings in my ears, "And after all this, we now know that, not only was lead bad for people, it was bad for cars, too. One reason car engines last so long now is..." I don't remember the exact words after that, but the point was lead damaged engines.
About 10 years later I was at my wife's high school reunion, at dinner sitting across from a Ph. D. chemist who worked for a company that had made the tetraethyl lead. I asked her to explain what the mechanism was whereby engines were attacked by it, if it were true. She said it was pretty common knowledge among her colleagues, and described the reactions, the interplay of water and breakdown products, the way chemists talk about things. Louis Hart
-----Original Message-----
From: TechNet [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Upton, Shawn
Sent: Tuesday, August 26, 2014 1:33 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: [TN] NTC - I believe ... (my credo)
Some time ago I did a bit of reading on it, probably found this link:
http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2013/01/how-did-lead-get-our-gasoline-anyway
Which I want to say lead to this reading:
http://www.thenation.com/print/article/secret-history-lead
But it was a while ago, and I can't find my notes, go figure.
In short, the need to boost octane goes back to the beginning. And oddly enough, ethanol was a leading contender for that additive! Yet lead won out, against its well-known health drawbacks.
The most interesting thing I got from that reading was the notion that, had big biz not won out, any and all pipelines would have been made from the get-go to handle the corrosive ethanol which otherwise is trucked. Or at least that was my thought about the matter. Might have had some portion of our fuel supply always renewable. Or at the very least had avoided the lead debacle. [Maybe not, hindsight isn't 20/20.]
Shawn Upton
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