The art of topping off a gas tank

 

The vigilance and concern for our safety of the California Air Resources Board hardly ends at the gas pump. It noses much more deeply into our lives. It curls its benevolent tendrils into the innermost of our sanctums - our garages, our sheds, or wherever we harbor our lawn mowers.

You can appreciate that minds brilliant enough to realize the horrors wrought upon mankind by escaping fuel vapors at the gas pump would not be content to rest there.

If this contagion threatens us when we fill our gas cans, it must also do so when we empty them. Imagine the untold suffering brought upon an unsuspecting public when an ordinary gas can is used to pour a gallon of gas into a lawn mower. Oh, the humanity!

But, fear not. Here, in the blessed land of higher awareness, we have been saved from the poisoning vapors that strike down those of you in the other 49 states by the millions each year.

The CARB has decreed that ordinary gas cans are far too dangerous and has banned their sale here. They have caused to be designed an ecologically sensitive and life-saving gas can that is the only sort that may now be legally sold here:

http://www.westmarine.com/buy/...as-can-red--14970594

 

The new cans are very simple to use. Just grasp the can firmly with both hands as always, and with your third hand gently pull back on the safety collar that releases a measured spray of gas over any horizontal surface within two feet of the spout.

By controlling the flow in this way, only an inconsequential amount of gas will ever end up in the lawn mower, limiting the amount of time it will run, and future generations will be guaranteed their rightful chance to breathe clean, untainted air.

I know I sleep much more soundly at night knowing that a caring, concerned, and well-informed government is looking out for my welfare if I am not smart enough to do that for myself.

 

The fastidiousness is uber

Mitch,

Fotutately for all of us, the gas can spout isn't a CARB thing, it's our friends at the EPA who have made them so useful for the three-handed among us. Two-handed people complaining would be insensitive to the small but downtrodden tridextrous  minority. As a result, we ALL get to enjoy these ADA/EPA compliant gas cans in all 50 states!

The EPA never sleeps in their pursuit of finding solutions to problems that only they (in their benificient omniscient wisdom) knew existed.

Sleep well my friend, with the slumber that can only come with the certain knowledge that no one, ever, anywhere in this great land can put gas in their mower without hosing down the entire mower, and killing every blade of grass in a 3 ft radius. The plan I'm sure, is to cut down on the need to mow at all. Once all the grass has been well and surely doused, nothing will ever grow there again, and society can be rid, once and for all time, of the stain of the small engine. 

A side benefit is the ability for the EPA to declare every yard in America a Superfund site. Once this has taken place, the EPA can assume its rightful role as the owners and benefactors of the entire country.

It's for your own good. 

 

Sorry Stan, I guess I was sleeping too soundly. A little Googling has shaken me awake (or as awake as I ever am).

It was CARB that first dreamed up this answer to a question that only they were asking. And I thought we in California were still the only lucky ones. I should have known better.

When the EPA saw what a wonderful solution this was, and how it allowed CARB to control a part of people's lives they never could before, the EPA just had to get a piece of the action.

It used to be that West Marine's web site carried both kinds of cans, but wouldn't ship the ones that worked to California. But starting in 2009, no one has a choice any more, from sea to shining sea.

Which, as you know, is how it should be in a democracy.

 

 

I had to buy one of those "new fangled gas cans."

That fancy spout broke the second time I used it.

Replaced it with a normal spout, which is now marketed as "old style."

http://www.amazon.com/N2-201-8...z+pour+gas+can+spout

 

I bet there are a lot of those folks from either New Jersey or Oregon - neither of those states allow people to pump their own gas.  That, and relatively high fuel prices are my two big reasons for never fueling up in NJ when I was commuting up/down the coast.  Plus, the one time I did fill up on the Jersey Pike (at the Vince Lombardi Service area) I got a tankful of really awful gas and the truck ran like $#!+ until I got to DC and filled up again - the new gas miraculously cured it.

I forgot one time in Portland, Oregon, and stopped for gas with a rental car, hopped out and started filling it.  The gas-er-up kid came running over and very politely told me I couldn't fill my car, that HE had to do it for me.  "Why?" I asked....giving him my best blank look. 

"It's the state law! " he replied....."I don't know why they do that.  You must not be from around here, huh?"

"Nope....I'm from a state that taxes me a lot but trusts me to know what I'm doing pumping gas".

"California, huh?  We're getting a LOT of you folks up here...  

It says something about this great nation that there is an aftermarket for retrofit $15 spouts for $10 gas cans, so they can be made operational.

We have a string of home improvement centers in this area called "Menards". They are out of WI, and are a practical lot. They merchandise the retrofit spouts right next to the new cans, so you can grab one of each and have a working gas can. Alternately, one can purchase a "water can" (you know... for water: wink, wink), which has the old-style spout.

It's blue, but as I said-- I've never been stopped by a real cop for filling up the wrong can in the wrong way (we haven't gotten to that level of idiocy just yet), although I did drive off from a Costco pump when the attendant insisted that I shut the car off before filling up.

As I drove off, I thought about how awful it would be to get up every morning and derive my sustenance from telling people how to fill up their own cars. 

Here you get to shut it off, car, cellphone, and do not use anything to stick in the nozzle for it to work automatically that too is against the law... been called out for doing it on the intercom... SIR your not allowed to do that. 

Oh, Costco man doesn't like those activities either, Ray. But Costco man has apparently never contended with restarting a hot carburated vehicle after being shut down for 3 minutes to refuel. Everybody oohs and ahhs over the car, but they struggle to just let me do what needs done to keep it happy.

I tend to prefer the stations run by folks from the Asian Subcontinent, who are satisfied to sit behind their bulletproof plastic shields and stare vacantly into the middle distance (as only somebody who has been on shift for 19 straight hours can). Those dudes couldn't care less if I pump gas into gallon ziplock bags, if my card is good. It's even better if there are about 45 pumps out there as well. I can pull up to the far one, fill up, go inside to get a 78 oz soft drink for $.82, and use the fastidiously clean rest room. If I'm on a roadtrip, I can buy some jerky sticks and probably a $25 cell-phone charger, as mine will have surely given up the ghost.

My local HW store has had the de-safety spouts and caps for sale next to the EPA approved gas cans for some time now.  I have purchased several of them.  Seems every year there is a new variation on the "safety" spout being foisted upon us, and each year I look and hope that they have made them both safe and useable. Alas, these qualities appear to be mutually exclusive. At least in the minds of the ninnies in charge of such things. Oh, wait!! I remember when gas cans all came with a flexible spout that you could just put into the tank and pour the gas.  So it is possible.  Can someone please tell me how unsafe that simple idea was/is?

Best gas can ever!  (But can only be used for racing fuels and water.)  

Art---yes, I now remember about the gas pump rubber cover.  Regulation after regulation---they don't call it the "left coast" for nothing.  I bet there are more fumes from gas spills  than from fumes when an automatic cutoff fails---as they sometimes do.    We don't use gas in the winter blended for cold temps either, and better prices per gallon partly because of that.  And from what I understand--no sanctuary cities either.  Things sure have changed since I lived in Woodland Hills, CA.

 Whatever. The libs have absolutely ruined CA.  Anyway I understand what you said--thanks for that.  We have a gas nozzles here in Dogpatch AR that is just the pipe at the end of the hose and luckily you can see the gas as the tank gets full.

And Terry had the best answer.

Rant finished---back to your regularly scheduled thread covering the topics about preventing Speedster gas tank filling leaks and the first hijack about spare tires.

With regard to Gordon's post on page 1, and the Tupperware thingy, I have only one question: what is a spare tire??  

Ya Know....Sometimes....I recall a friend of mine who would always make this comment. I didn't really know what he was referring to but it sounded like a heavyweight wish....He said: "I HOPE ALL OF YOU ECOLOGY BA&(@&A&!ATS FREEZE TO DEATH IN THE DARK".........BRUCE


On Thursday, February 18, 2016 12:23 PM, SpeedsterOwners.com <**************> wrote:


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| Subject: The art of topping off a gas tank Reply By: Jack Crosby In: Speedsters / General (Non-Technical) | |

Art---yes, I now remember about the gas pump rubber cover.  Regulation after regulation---they don't call it the "left coast" for nothing.  I bet there are more fumes from gas spills  than from fumes when an automatic cutoff fails---as they sometimes do.    We don't use gas in the winter blended for cold temps either, and better prices per gallon partly because of that.  And from what I understand--no sanctuary cities either.  Things sure have changed since I lived in Woodland Hills, CA. Whatever. The libs have absolutely ruined CA.  Anyway I understand what you said--thanks for that.  We have a gas nozzles here in Dogpatch AR that is just the pipe at the end of the hose and luckily you can see the gas as the tank gets full.And Terry had the best answer.Rant finished---back to your regularly scheduled thread covering the topics about preventing Speedster gas tank filling leaks and the first hijack about spare tires.   View This Reply Sincerely, SpeedsterOwners.com - 356 Speedsters, 550 Spyders, Replicas and more https://www.speedsterowners.com To adjust your email notifications for this site, please update your notification settings. To suspend ALL email notifications from this site, click here. Powered By Hoop.la

Only you guys could do a two+ page thread on how to fill the gas tank.

OK, I'll bite.

1. The EPA is not our enemy. It's just not. You LA guys ought to be especially aware of this, most of you having breathed 1970s LA air at one time or another. Anyone remember that smell?

And, yeah, you can pull back the thingie on the nozzle to fill your bike tank or your gas can if you want. You won't get "cited." 

Who the hell do you think would cite you? The gas pump jockey? Does such a person exist anymore outside of New Jersey?

2. As for that "I know what I'm doing, so . . ." face, I used to encounter that all the time, when I was a gas pump jockey. Usually it was guys carrying in an old oil can or a milk jug and wanting me to fill it. Often enough they were smoking a cigarette while making the request. Nope.

More than once it was people with a styrofoam cooler wanting to fill that with gas.

On one such occasion, after they argued, I handed one such expert a styrofoam coffee cup to hold while I pumped a nickel's worth of high-test in it. 

If you don't know what happened then, educate yourself.

Once again, for emphasis: you guys have maintained a long discussion about how to fill an automobile's gas tank. And now some of you are bitching about regulations. And chest-thumping about your expertise. In America, a country full-to-brimming with dangerous morons.

As President Nixon would say, My God.

Thx, Ed, for taking one for the team.  That first incoming scud missile is now logged on to your lat/long.

Ed,

I'll bet a lot of us were pump jockeys at one time or another. My love for Porsches is directly linked to filling up new 911s and 914s from the dealership across the street from the Gulf station I worked at back in the seventies.

People didn't pump their own gas back then. That came about as a byproduct of the energy crisis, when gas became so expensive the independent operators offered their customers a choice: pay less to do it yourself or pay for the privilege of having it done for you.

Californians liked saving money so self service became the norm. At first, full service was offered to seniors for the reduced price but I haven't seen that in practice for quite some time. So, you rarely see a "pump jockey" here in the glorious state of Cali.

Regular people with regular jobs and regular problems come in to pump highly flammable hazardous materials into that little gooseneck. Their thoughts elsewhere, they dribble a little on the ground...no big deal. Until it's multiplied by many times over. New gas nozzles! Great idea! Somebody forgets to replace the nozzle after filling up, they were distracted by the thought of the major f*ck up they did at work today...auto pump shut off and break away hoses. Again, great idea. All of these ideas truly help.

But...when you're pumping gas into your bike or an antique car or a gas can for your lawn mower - the safety nozzle becomes a cumbersome nuisance. That new safety nozzle on the gas can? It works about 50% of the time but it leaks about 80% of the time.

Not all solutions are practical. Not all methods work for everybody.  

As far as my "don't f*ck with me" face? I earned it, dude.

 

Yeah!!! What Terry said! 

California spends nearly $500 BILLION dollars regulating small businesses. That is more than the state of Texas.

 

Ed, I think we can all agree that controls over industrial excesses are necessary - or we end up with the kind of ecological disasters that are happening in China and the LA smog you mention.

But, as anyone who likes driving a Speedster knows, balance is the key. If going from 70 hp to 150 hp in a light, nimble chassis is a good thing, going to 600 hp isn't necessarily so. At some point, what started as a good idea becomes absurd - a parody of itself.

Which brings us to the gas can that doesn't work, sprays more gas on your shoes than in the tank, and in so doing puts more vapors into the air than what it replaced. Anyone with a brain in his head can see that this is a monumentally dumb idea, and yet, 15 years down the road, we're all stuck with this lunacy.

That some state agency was able to concoct such an idea, jam it down our throats unopposed, and have the idea adopted nationally is a good sign that things are seriously out of balance.

I think it's all a question of power and reasonable controls of that power. The EPA needs a certain amount of clout to be taken seriously in its battles with rich and powerful industries. But power must be used wisely or it soon becomes arrogance and even tyranny.

In this silly story of a leaky gas can, I think there are signs that the emperor, if not completely naked, needs to put some more clothes on.

 

Ed-- You're one of my favorite people on this site, but I knew we could finally disagree on something if we looked hard enough. I guess gas nozzles turned out to be the thin end of the wedge.

Revisiting sentencing laws? I'm your man. Ending corporate welfare and influence? Sign me up. Scaling back the military industrial complex? Absolutely. Helping refugees seeking asylum? I'm way left of center on this. Amnesty for illegal aliens? Seriously, how can you deport 20 million people? I think background chemicals are slowly killing us all.

But the EPA is my friend?

I'm sure that the agency is populated by well intentioned people who see it that way, and the EPA did clean up LA and the rivers of the industrial NE (40 years ago, now). But like all organizations and organisms-- the EPA must grow and reproduce, or age into irrelevance and die. If all the low hanging fruit has been harvested, they must find other ills to correct or pass into obscurity. No one wants to be irrelevant. New demons will be found and exorcised.

At this point, we are down to gas spouts. Yes Ed, gas spouts. There are more pressing environmental issues (Flint, MI?), but fixing them is hard. Gas spouts and light bulbs are easy. Since we are talking about it, can you (or anyone?) explain to me how the safety spouts on cans protect the environment (in the real world) in any way? I can't see it.

I know I'm ranting, but this strikes really close to home. I'm a refrigeration guy. The EPA crawls around in my life to a pretty great degree. The Montreal Protocol decimated an entire class of small businessmen (small-town independent grocers) who went from being prosperous members of their communities to bankrupt and unemployable middle-aged men. Those guys were my friends.

It's been 27 years-- the Antarctic ozone hole is still there (and getting bigger by some accounts). I'm told this is a residual effect, and I should see an improvement any year now. So far, not yet. 

We're on the front end of the second wave of refrigerants as destroyers of the environment, but this time there will be no drop-in replacement gases. The timing of the "crisis" curiously corresponds to the expiration of the patents on the old "new" gases. Once there was no windfall for chemical companies to reap, we had to push towards something else.

For a while, WalMart and Target thought CO2 was the hot setup... but it runs crazy-high pressures, and lifts the relief valves every time there's a power outage (which happens a lot, due to the condition of the grid). As of today, butane looks like the most likely next step, once things kick into high gear in a couple of years. Science is not coming to the rescue this time. The low-hanging fruit is gone.

Think about that for a second. We are about to move from stable, inert, azeotropic, non-toxic, non-ozone depleting gases, and replace it with a fuel. I could go on for hours about why this is straight out of the theater of the surreal-- but facts make no difference to the faith of true believers (consider "the virtues of the electric car"), so off we will march into a brave new future replete with exploding supermarkets.

The EPA needs to keep finding problems, or their raison d'être is gone. This cannot, and will not happen. Organizations (like organisms) are born in passion and need, gather strength in the fight for survival, establish dominance, and then reproduce.

The EPA is no longer about protecting the environment. They are about raw political power. I'm not a conspiracy theorist, I'm a realist. The EPA is not my friend.

Before a patent ends there is usually another product slightly different but suggested to be better for more money brought on then they slowly kill the old one.  Part of the extortion, no different in any field.

California even regulates how many gallons per minute a gas pump can pump gas. The lunacy of it is maddening.

I love how these threads (just about 100%) get hi-jacked and morph into something entirely unrelated to the original topic... and in that spirit...

Mitch, I've contacted the president of the PCA  who agreed to help you replicate the spare-tire storage space for your speedster. He will only meet you at night, and only with your promise of complete immunity and anonymity.

Let me know and I'll set-up the meet.

Will Hesch posted:

...Mitch, I've contacted the president of the PCA  who agreed to help you replicate the spare-tire storage space for your speedster. He will only meet you at night, and only with your promise of complete immunity and anonymity.

Let me know and I'll set-up the meet.

Will, I knew that new engine of yours would fool some people - but the president of the PCA? Damn, I'm impressed!

Hook me up.

sounds like a setup to me, leave the rolex at home and take little ca$h..:}

I agree with both Ed and Stan - to a point, which means I agree with Mitch.  The EPA's mission is laudable and it has helped prevent us from becoming like China is now, but they are a bureaucracy, which means that the mission is secondary to feeding the bureaucracy.  Working with such bureaucracies (DoD in my case) on a daily basis has made me very cynical about them.  At a certain threshold the mission gets lost and the organization starts to hire those who have no clue (or concern) about the mission and whose motives are all about career advancement.  In many cases those people are small minded fools that couldn't understand the technical ramifications of the policies they create and enforce no matter how much you tried to explain it to them.  Once a policy is in place, there entire focus is the mindless enforcement of it because that is how they feel safe in their career.  After all, thinking is a scary process.

This mindset is throughout all of the government bureaucracies and is the root of many, if not most of the problems related to government.  How to remove hundreds of thousands of such mindless, and occasionally downright evil drones is a problem that I don't have an answer for.  Can you tell how I feel about this?

I'm Lane and I approved this message.

Sometimes, a little regulation is a good thing.  I used to travel a lot and was always appalled at the amount of garbage along the sides of the road in a lot of other countries - if some of you have traveled outside of the US, you might have seen this, too, like in India:

Or Russia:  

Or especially, China:

Western Europe, England, Scotland and Ireland were never like this - ever.  

The Middle East? - That's another thing.

Yeah.

It's quite a stretch to say that without mandated safety spouts or the elimination of incandescent light bulbs, we're doomed as a nation to become India or China or Russia, but... OK, I guess. 

I never said a little regulation wasn't a good thing. But how about we take care of pesticides and poison in the potable water supply before we fire a flare up my tailpipe, or tell me what kind of gas can I might be allowed?

It isn't either/or. 

Lane, Sounds like you deal with the same DoD that I have dealt with for quite some time.  You pretty much nailed it.  Self-perpetuating incompetence.  Sad, really.