Old gasoline, what to do with it

[michel88]

My best friend has a '75 Datsun 280Z that he has left sitting in his garage for about 3 years. It is in excellent condition and I have been bugging him to get it running before it sits too long and has problem. Saturday he called and said he was ready to get it running. We decided to drain out the old gas because it could be bad. It had a drain plug in the tank and it came out clear and not smelling bad. Now I have a 5 gallon gas can full of it and I am wondering what to do with it. My recycling center takes drain oil and antifreeze but I don't think they take old gas. What do I do with it? By the way the car started up and ran fine after we got a new battery and changed the oil.

[Rusty_OToole]

If it looks like gas and smells like gas it should be OK to burn in your car.

[West Peterson]

Mix it with good gas and use it in your lawn mower... Maybe 4 good parts to one bad...

[Shop Rat]

Or you can mix it with used oil and it makes a world class penetrant for things like rusted in valves, pistons and bolts.

We have a '39 Dodge and that is what Bill did with the old gas that had been sitting in the tank for several years.

[mrpushbutton]

Put a little bit at a time in your daily driver. $3.65/ga and climbing here in Michigan!

Better yet, find a neighbor or friend who is always tracking/bragging about their milage in their japanese car. Put a little bit at a time in their tank and watch the bragging get worse.

Then stop.

[West Peterson]

... then, in the dark of night, syphon a lot of it back out and see him pull the hair out of his head.

[R W Burgess]

You guys are devious!

Wayne

[Barry Wolk]

My FIL loved to tell the story about how he and fellow engineers at Chrysler (in the early '60s) conspired to skew the numbers on a coworker's VW. They were so tired of listening to him go on about how great his car was that they slowly ramped up his mileage until he was getting over 100 mpg. Then they drastically dropped it to about 10 mpg. They had trouble keeping straight faces when he came in and told them that he had received communications from Germany addressing his plight.

One day he shows up driving his wife's car and they ask him where his car was. He told them it was at the dealer getting a new engine. As he left, they rolled on the floor laughing. No one ever told him what they had done yet all his bragging stopped once his mileage returned to normal.

My FIL experimented early on with automotive applications of cyanoacrylate glue (Super Glue). They would purposefully park near the window of a restaurant. When the meal was over he would leave some paper money, some change and a quarter, forever glued to the table. Parking near the window would give him a clear view of the wait staff's frustration.