On Mon, 12 May 1997, David Offer wrote:
> My 1960 MK1 MGA was converted to unleaded last year, I use the car every
day for work in the summer and have had no problems with it. Just after I
had, had the car converted I heard that cars in New Zealand were catching
fire due to the hotter running of unleaded petrol. So I used to fill the
car with unleaded one week and leaded the next. I have had no problems in
doing so and no noticable difference in performance.
Reply:
I read quite a lot of fairly dire predictions and a lot of hand-wringing
about anticipated valve problems with unleaded in the 3 british classic
car mags I subscribe to. I think they are overreacting.
One british magazine says this month that most british cars in the US have
been converted for unleaded fuel. I doubt that. My impression is that
very few US enthusiasts have had their (auto) heads converted for unleaded
fuel. Most of the cars don't get used continuously or under heavy loads,
and most don't run up big annual mileages. I don't know of anyone who has
had a problem he could trace to lack of lead. I worried about my old
garden tractor, which was designed for leaded fuel. It has been used with
unleaded fuel for about 10 years now, summer and winter, running hard,
under load, at maximum throttle, and it still seems fine. If a cheap
Briggs and Stratton one cylinder flathead air cooled engine can survive
without lead, I would think almost anything can.
W. R. Gibbons Dept. of Molecular Physiology & Biophysics
Univ. of Vermont College of Medicine, Burlington, VT
gibbons@northpole.med.uvm.edu (802) 656-8629
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