OT: Kerosene Contaminated With Lethicin

On Fri, 15 Dec 2006 15:08:08 -0800, with neither quill nor qualm, JR North quickly quoth:

Please note the spelling of both words:

this help?

- Ever wonder what the speed of lightning would be if it didn't zigzag? -

Don't be a sucker.

Try extracting with a small quantity of ethanol/water. I found one link that suggested 87% ethanol, 13% water, but I bet anything between 75 and

95% would be okay :-). You need to put the kerosene in a vessel where you can drain the water off the bottom if possible. Maybe try one cup of ethanol/water to one gallon kerosene, mix well for several minutes, let stand until the two phases separate, drain off the ethanol/water. Repeat a few times with clean ethanol/water and see how clean the kerosene is. Denatured alcohol is fine for this, and methanol or even isopropanol would work but probably not as well. You can try pouring the kerosene off of the top of the alcohol/water layer but it is tough to do that without mixing the phases back up. Hmm, wonder if you could dip the kerosene out with a ladle or bowl? Anyway, it is better to do several extractions with small portions than one extraction with all the solvent at once, and you are going to wind up with some alcohol dissolved in the kerosene but (I hope :-)) that won't change the way it burns. Guess you'll have to weigh the cost of the kerosene against the cost of the alcohol. Final hmmm - maybe just try extracting with water to start with, then evaporate the water to dryness to gauge how much lecithin you extracted.

-- Regards, Carl Ijames carl dott ijames aat verizon dott net (remove nospm or make the obvious changes before replying)

If you have other uses or kerosene, like fire starting (that's what I use kerosene for), I would just use it for that and would not bother purifying it.

i

To mix sugar into gasoline, dissolve the sugar in some water, pour in a bottle of methylated spirits, mix well and pour the lot into the gas tank. It will now mix with the gasoline.(Water and all).

Graham Horne.

To mix sugar into gasoline, dissolve the sugar in some water, pour in a bottle of methylated spirits, mix well and pour the lot into the gas tank. It will now mix with the gasoline.(Water and all).

Graham Horne.

Graham Horne wrote in article ...

Having worked on gasohol experiments in the '70s, I can assure you that methanol WILL mix with gasoline, and water WILL mix with methanol.........

.......but a syringe full of water added to a gallon of 10 percent gasoline/methanol mixture WILL cause the water/methanol mixture to precipitate out of the gasoline.

This is plainly visible to the naked eye.

Gasoline and water DO NOT mix.....period.

Yes, I may have got mixed up. A not very nice gentleman did it to my Datsun 200B years ago. Maybe the water precipitated out and left the sugar dissolved in the gas. Didn't do any short term damage to the motor, Just clogged up the muffler. However, the motor only lasted about 8 months after that. I assume the sugar left carbon deposits in the ring grooves.

Graham Horne.

IIRC, you could use the kero/lethicin to make Ed's Red ;)

Isn't it lecithin? not lethicin? What the hell is it doing in fuel oil? It's a food supplement. I have taken it in tablet form and was jumpy all day

On Sat, 16 Dec 2006 19:31:34 -0800, with neither quill nor qualm, JR North quickly quoth:

Yes. Tendjewberrymud.

Holy moley! Call Exxon. They might have figured out how to get all the seawater out of their goo while they were having their little Alaska adventure near Valdez a decade back.

Is the lecithin too small to filter mechanically?

- - Let Exxon send their own troops -

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On Fri, 15 Dec 2006 15:08:08 -0800, JR North wrote:.

Leave it outside in the cold so the lecithin solidifies, then filter ? Cannot try it here as it is summer, in any case it does not get cold enough in winter. Alan, in Gosnells, Western Oz. VK6 YAB VKS 737 - W 6174

Well, lecithin is not a protein, it is a mixture of various phospholipids and other things. See

for a one page description. It is used as a food safe lubricant in those spray cooking oils like Pam, as a lubricant in lotions (and "Ed's Red", as someone else pointed out :-)), and as a emulsifier to bring together and stabilize oil and water in salad dressings and mayonaise. Structurally it is basically a detergeant, with one end that is highly polar and so water loving, and two ends that are long chain hydrocarbons and so grease/oil loving. That means that a good bit will dissolve in the kerosene. Also, a fair amount of ethanol will also dissolve in kerosene. Definitely do some tests with plain tap water to see how much you can get out with that before adding the ethanol (if necessary as a final wash). Get one of those 2.5 gallon or so jugs of spring water with a screw cap on top and a pour spout on the bottom to use as a separatory funnel, and start with half gallon or gallon volumes of the kerosene, plus a cup or two of water. That gives plenty of headspace when you shake it all up for good mixing, and a drain valve to get the water layer off the bottom, and you can see through it unlike the liquid laundry detergeant bottles. Shake for a minute or two, let stand several minutes (remember, it will want to form an emulsion which will take forever to really finish separating), drain off the water and evaporate to dryness to see how much you got. Add more water and repeat to see if you get less each time which means you are doing a good job of extracting it, or the same little dab each time which means it ain't going to work. If you have a gram scale you could use disposable plastic cups and a microwave to boil off the water and go by weight, or else just eyeball the film in a pan. Also try adding a tablespoon or two per gallon of kerosene of salt, the cheapest you have - table, rock, sidewalk, whatever. That will help break up the emulsion after shaking, and may help extract more but since you will also get the salt when you dry the water it makes it hard to see if it really helped the extraction. I'm hoping that simple water extraction will clean up the kerosene enough for you to burn it, but I've never worked with this exact mixture so it's just guesswork. Please let me know what you wind up trying and how successful you are.

-- Regards, Carl Ijames carl dott ijames aat verizon dott net (remove nospm or make the obvious changes before replying)

"JR North" wrote in message news:XMudnd7Dh7KEJxnYnZ2dnUVZ snipped-for-privacy@seanet.com...

Sure, but what is in the tank WILL be pulled through the fuel system, and eventually make it into the carburetor. I have no idea what it will do to a fuel injection system, but in a carbureted engine, it WILL eventually get into the cylinders. it doesn't matter whether it is as a solution, as little sugar-water droplets suspended in the gasoline, or even as solid bits of sugar that work their way through the fuel filter. The sugar will caramelize into pure carbon, until the entire engine is a horrible mess of knocking carbon. It probably takes six to nine months of sucking on the sugar-water-gasoline blend to accomplish the damage. But, that vehicle eventually got so bad you couldn't shut the engine off! When you turned the key off, it just started knocking horribly. About the only way to shut it off was to put the auto. trans in gear and floor the accelerator. Eventually, it knocked a hole in a piston. I observed this personally in 1968 - 69 at my high school.

Jon

Ahh, we were there about 2 weeks ago. Our power was off 15 hours, my mother in law was out about 3 days, my boss was out 5 days. I didn't try anything non-essential, just furnace, refrigerator and freezer, and keeping some batteries charged for flashlights, etc. We only ran the generator twice, for about 90 minutes every 5 hours. We were just about to fire it up the 3rd time when the lights came back on. Our generator was plenty loud, too.

Jon

His 265 GALLONS will start a LOT of fires!

Jon