Years ago in Africa, I would occasionally see a guy get a stalled car running again by spraying a mouthful of gasoline into some part of the engine. My question is, what part of the engine would that be, and why would this work?
I would assume it was the carburetor. When I had a car with a carb, and I ran out of gas, I would spray some quick start stuff in the carb to get it going after I had put gas back in the car. This helped cause the carb was empty. It was a gas mixture.
Older cars typically had a mechanical fuel pump driven by a lobe on the camshaft. When you ran out of gas you had to crank the engine long enough to pump the carb bowl full of gas. This could take a long time, and if your battery was a bit old, you might run out of juice before you got it started.
If the fuel pump was a bit worn, it might not even prime at all at cranking speed.
By putting a priming dose of fuel into the intake, the engine would run for a bit (albeit not at anything close to ideal mixture) and run the fuel pump to get things working normally.
I’ve done that before to get a car to start that ran dry, and I was surprised at how well it worked. I could even keep the car running with no fuel pump attached by spaying gasoline from a plant mister every 1-2 seconds. The IC engine (at least, 1970’s era ones) is a very flexible device.
:eek:
Holy crap!
Allow me to repeat
:eek:
Yeah, made me cringe, too, to see the guy taking a swig from the jerrycan in the trunk.