this question just piqued my interest for no reason in particular-
how does sugar disrupt the function of a gasoline engine?
i have three possibilities, but i don’t know which is correct, if any of them.
(1.) the gasoline just acts as a sediment, blocking the fuel line. using sugar is just ‘traditional’.
(2.) the sugar dissolves in the gasoline, and binds with it in some way, eliminating it’s ability to burn, thereby requiring the car owner to drain the tank and the fuel line before it will run again.
(3.) Hi, Opal!
(4.) the sugar dissolves in the gas, and calcifies in the cylinders, rendering the car inoperable unless the engine is completly rebuilt.
i did a search for “sugar in the gastank” and found nothing, so i think i am safe.
I recall in JR high chem an experiment where soem kind of acid was added to sugar, and it resulting reaction freed the carbon from the sugar. The interesting thing was that the carbon alone took up much more volume that the sugar.
Perhaps a similar reaction occurs in an auto engine, and everything get clogged with carbon.
I don’t think that sugar does anything in a gas tank (beyond what any other sediment might do.) The gas is organic, and I believe that sugars are only water soluble.
Sugar will play hell with an engine if you put in the oil though. Back when I was a motorcycle mechanic, we had a touring bike come in with a bad engine. On tear down, we found that something had formed hard, smooth deposits on the top of every valve guide, sticking the valve stems in the guide bores. We didn’t taste test it, but it sure looked like someone had put sugar in the oil and it had caramelized on the valves.
Yes! I remember this! About a half beaker of sugar, pour in some acid and foooom up sprang a stack of black carbon about 6-8 times higher than the beaker. My friends & I were so impressed by it that after school we stopped by the chemisty lab to have another look-see. The teacher opened up the cabinet full of the day’s experiments and there were 8 beakers with huge black carbon masses sticking a foot or so up in the air.
Our science teacher did this one, too. If memory serves, the acid in question was sulfuric. Looked like one of those snake thingies we used to get for the 4th of July.
Sugar doesn’t do anything except clog up the fuel filter. A new fuel filter costs about $3, but whoever-it-is may not have the ability or knowledge to change one at the time.
Somebody posted in another similar thread that you had to add salt to the sugar, but I had never heard that before, and salt doesn’t dissolve in gasoline either. And I don’t know, but heavily suspect, that sugar and salt together don’t dissolve in gasoline anyway. I’d have tried it at the time but it was the middle of winter and I didn’t have any lawn mower gas around to waste.
You can pour motor oil into the gas tank, and it will make their car smoke and smell a lot. This didn’t hurt older carbureted cars beyond making them run poorly until the gas/oil was all burned through, but newer cars I don’t know. It might do something horrible to injectors, oxygen sensors or cat. converters.
There’s nothing commonly available that you can pour into a gas tank that will silently, quickly and completely ruin a car’s engine. -And all ordinary pump gas has all kinds of various junk floating around in it, in small percentages. A little bit of almost anything getting into the cylinders and being lit isn’t going to keep the car from running or cause it to explode.