Funny, I was wondering about this on the way home. I just found the closed thread asking how much sugar will stop a car.
This is a legitimate question. Please do not post any advice on illegal activities.
Question: What is it about sugar that causes a car to stop working? Sugar contains energy, so I would think that it would burn. I know that if it got into the engine mixed with fuel, then it would cause the fuel/air mixture to burn less efficiently because sugar is not an effective source of fuel when burned outside of the body. But is it really as simple as that? That too much sugar would just reduce the ability of the fuel to combust? Or does it actually cause damage? If so, then what?
Sorry. Hydroxyl groups are just OH groups, oxygen bonded to hydrogen bonded to a carbon. A basic sugar, like glucose, is a ring of five carbons and a hydrogen, with a sixth carbon coming off the ring and an OH group attached to every carbon. All these oxygens make the molecule easily dissolvable in solvents like water, polar solvents. Gasoline is a mix of pure hydrocarbons, molecules that are just made up of carbon and hydrogen. These sorts of molecules, for example, oils, don’t mix with water because of a inherent difference in the chemical structure having to do with polarity and differences in electronegativity and the like, none of which I know how to explain easily, especially this late at night. Just think of it as being that glucose dissolves in water because it has a lot of structures on the outside part of the molecule very similar to water and thus will not dissolve in another liquid that will not mix with water.
In chemistry, a simple rule is “like dissolves like”. This means that chemicals dissolve substances similar to themselves. Common salt (NaCl) a polar molecule dissolves easily in water H[sub]2[/sub]O - another polar molecule.
Asterion already mentioned about sugar.
Ever notice that when gasoline or oil gets on electrical tape, the glue just seems to disappear? Again it’s one petroleum byproduct dissolving another.
The second staff report sound like all that happened is the fuel filter got plugged. A changed fuel filter should have cured the problem, for a time (until it got plugged) Lather rinse repeat. or flush the tank, and solve the problem once and for all.
It should be noted that fuel injected cars have much larger, and finer filters than cars with carbs. This would take more time to plug the filter.
As far as what is mentioned as to damage inside the engine I have 2 words, oil filter. The oil filter would filter out the abrasive particles… That is what is it there for.
I would be more concerned with the heat of the engine melting the sugar into candy.
How’s the oil filter going to filter out stuff that gets past the fuel filter? If your oil filter is filtering out stuff in your gasoline, you’ve got bigger problems than sugar in your tank, bubba.
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Now, if you REALLY want to put someone out of commission, sand in the oil fill tube is the ticket. Once the sand gets sucked up by the oil pump, it will score the pistons and the chambers and make the engine scrap.**
Before any oil gets to bearings or to the pistons it goes through the oil filter. The oil filter is designed to remove any abrasive particles.
Now before anyone hits reply, yes I know that air-cooled VWs had no oil filter. Obviously my comments do not apply to any engine that does not have an oil filter. Also I would expect the sand (or sugar) if added to the crankcase to place severe wear on the pump itself (most pumps only have a screen to keep very large particles out the pump, (the oil filter is post pump) So any sand that is sucked into the pump would abrade the pump (esp if the pump body is aluminum) big time. This could result in a loss of oil pressure in the engine.
Getting back to the sugar in the fuel system question, from the staff report it is not clear that any of the sugar got past the fuel filter. The only info given is that the car would not run except with externally added fuel (starter spray). A completely plugged fuel filter would not pass any fuel, which is exactly the symptom exhibited by the car in question. No investigation of the condition of the filter, carb or engine was done, so we can only go by the symptoms listed. No fuel = plugged filter, or dead pump.
I’m not sure what you mean here. A solution is what you get when one substance dissolves in another. So yes, sugar dissolves in water, to form a solution.
And remember, if you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the precipitate.
Instead of circulating through the oil passages, the sand would probably be splashed around by the crankshaft. Most of the damage would be to the bottom end unless the sand clogged the pickup screen for the oil pump.
Speaking of sugar in the oil, I think that I worked on a motorcycle that had the engine ruined when someone put sugar in the oil. The customer’s complaint was that the bike wouldn’t run; a compression test showed near-zero compression for all four cylinders. I don’t remember that anything was wrong with the bottom end, but each of the exhaust valves was coated with a rock-hard, brown plastic gunk, as were the exhaust valve guides. The gunk had glued the valves inside the guide bores, and each valve was held off of its seat. I don’t remember if we were able to get the guides out of the bores, much less if we were able to fix the engine.
Yeah, OK, I missed that bit. Still, the sand’s gonna get sloshed around in there, chewing up the journal bearings and crankshaft oil seals, at the very least. Despite the presence of the oild filter, this can’t be a good situation. I agree your valves and camshaft are safe, though.
If you really wanna f someone up, all it takes is 2 tablespoons of gasoline (regular unleaded is fine, don’t waste money on high-test) put into their sugar bowl. They’ll sit there sipping their morning coffee wondering why it tastes “off”.
On the OHC engines I’ve seen, the oil fill is directly on top of the camshafts. You can easily see them looking in, the valvetrain would be first in the line of fire.
You’re right! I’d forgotten about this entirely. I’ve seen this arrangement on non-OHC engines too, in fact. Not the camshaft, of course, but the oil fill was on the valve cover, and if you took this off, you could clearly see the valve stems and the rocker arms on top of the head.
