Negative. I’ve seen this trick performed before my own eyes. The gasoline did not ignite. I’m not going to fill in the details, so as not to encourage anyone to do such an experiment. Anyone who fiddles with burning objects and gasoline is either an idiot, or a science teacher (as in the demonstration I witnessed).
[HIJACK]
One of the many (and probably stupid) things that my friends have done recently is drive around pouring petrol on the road in patterns and lighting it up. Without delving into just how stupid/illegal/unethical this is, isn’t petrol meant to go “Ka-boom” rather than create a “pretty” picture on the road?
More specifically, if I fill a jerry can with petrol and light it, why won’t it explode? It just burns… But, if I go into a service station and light a match, the whole place is meant to go ‘ka-boom’ and end up on the evening news… Why is this so? 
[/HIJACK]
“I worked at a gas station for a few too many years, and I can tell you that gasoline is nearly
the best way to clean oil off of concrete (IMO, kerosene works a bit better).”
Naw, buy something at the auto store for cleaning floors. they have some wonderful extrememly safe stuff.
Thanks for the fire dept. tip. I think that would be the better route to take. This is a neighbor that I am on good terms with, have been to parties in his backyard, we have traded food, etc., so I certainly don’t want to start a battle. And he is definitely not running a meth lab. Since he has a wife and two kids that he dotes on, I honestly don’t believe that he knows what he’s doing is dangerous. And I don’t want to start a battle.
I choose the fire dept. over HazMat. Thank you.
Palmitate is a salt of palmitic acid, a common fatty acid. It’s a kind of soap.
Now your reminding me of the guy that wanted to clean car parts. He put them in gasoline in a kettle and heated the kettle on the stove. I think this was on the Darwin Award Site.
I and my cousin were picking rose schafers off plants in my aunts garden. We dropped them into a can with about half a cup of gasoline. We finished by dumping the gas out and dropping a match. The flames spread along the ground for about ten feet. Extreme panick started at that point.
I won’t store gas or propane in the house or outer buildings ever, that includes gas engines like mowers. They all sit out under a roofed shed with losts of air blowing throught it.
To get even more off subject my uncle was burned over 90% of his body with third degree burns, in a coal dust explosion. He actually had his story published in Reader’s Digest in 1980. The only reason he lived was that a friend went in and pulled my uncle out, and received some 2nd degree burns. A very great friend I will add. I do remember the month of our stay in the hospital with my mother. You could look inside the burn center from the window, but he was always screaming. Had my aunt not been pregnant with their first child, she would have caved in and pulled life support.
He now has 4 daughters that soon all will be in college. I will look him in the eyes, which many won’t do, but what the hell I have Sydenhams Chorea and have facial ticks all the time, and he’s my uncle and I can see beyond the scars that cover him. I don’t think many outside his immediate family will do that, and I can tell he’s not used to it.
I’m very careful about something like this. I would have called the fire department with the neighbor cleaning the garage with gasoline and soap. It couldn’t happen to him or you, right?
I’ve seen it too,Chas.It can be done if the container is filled almost to the top and the ambient temperature isn’t too high. If a person were too try it with a 5 gallon pail with an inch of gas in it on a hot day in July, well it would get a little bit hotter. But don’t try this at home anyway.
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- Negative: I heard it from a local fire inspector years back, and some friends and I tried it later on, one boring day. A lit cigarette will not ignite gasoline or gasoline vapor. It seems like it should, but it don’t. - MC
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It won’t, as long as you don’t heat up the coal by puffing on it. We had an flash fire incident at our university’s art studios a long time ago. We used to actually smoke DURING classes in the painting studios, now there’s a throwback to a bygone era. It was considered safe during the winter, but not during the summer because the air temp in the freezing studio was way below the flash point of the turpentine solvents we used. One winter, a woman got tired of freezing all the time, and brought in an electric space heater and stuck it in a corner. It heated up the air to above the flash point. At about her third puff, the air was warm enough, and BOOM. She was badly burned and the building was burned to the ground.