Lead Replacement additives?

Hi guys,

What do you all recommend as a lead replacement additive for old *68 petrol engines? Or are they capable of running on ordinary unleaded?

Thanks
Wacker

I used to put additives in the fuel of my 1952 AL-160 but found it ran a lot better on straight unleaded so have left it out with no trouble for about ten years

Same here on my old Studes and Inters. If I get any trouble, it's percolation. No valve trouble.

Try 2 litres of diesel fuel to a tankful. No adverse effect or smoke, yet provides valve guide and seat lube .

...............so I am wasting $3.50 on one of those little bottles for every tankful I put in the '56 Austin?

I don't know about the diesel providing lubrication and valve protection. It sounds good in theory but lead (or a lead replacement) has lots of special properties that cushion the valves, dissipate heat and provide valve stem lubrication as well as being a major factor in determining octane - anti-knock - rating. Someone with some scientific knowledge might comment on these theories.

What a dose of diesel will do is seriously drop the octane rating of the fuel.

Your Austin probably ran on Standard (80-87 octane) so putting diesel in would only bring current fuel down to what it was built for. I suspect serious long term damage to higher compression engines of the period such as the overhead valve V8's if you were doing lots of miles. You may not be aware of the engine "pinking" or "pinging" but lower octane fuel will certainly be causing mischief in the compression chamber.

My two cents worth votes for lead replacement and leave the diesel for diesel trucks. But like everyone else, I might be wrong.

How about Avgas ? 100 octane low lead.

A product I have used on various engines, diesel petrol & lpg, is a fuel star canister containg tin pellets that work the same as lead used to in petrol. If anyone wants to know how good this works, I can give you print outs from my gas analyser files of exhaust emissions, & how clean the engines run using this product.

I have reports from guys who have fitted them to harley davidson m/cycles with excellent reports.



www.fuelstar.com

Gilly

I have been using flash-lube in the XP Ute and the International truck on the basis that if you buy it in a one litre or bigger bottle it works out to be less than $1 per tank so not that expensive.

I also use Premium in the Ute and Standard in the truck. I did try premium in the truck for about 6 or 7 tanks in a row but found it didn't offer any improvements in the fuel economy i could calculate nor could I feel any difference in the power so decided to save the money. The ute runs better on Premium so I use that unless the service station doesn't have any.

I do avoid ethanol blends in both.

I work on the basis that using flashlube and avoiding ethanol are both cheaper than an engine or fuel system rebuild. The plan is to modify the heads for unleaded if I ever have to pull them off for other reasons.

I was told my Scout had hardened valve seats to didn't bother with additives. Found out the hard way that you shouldn't believe everything you get told. Just recently had to get the heads rebuilt because the the valve seats had gone completely in two cylinders. The $3,000 it cost me would have paid for a lot of additive. :-[