Fuel System Cleaner..Which?
FYI: I had a fuel injected pickup that sat for about 4 months before I could get it sold. It had a bad miss so I checked the plugs and wires and found no problems.Then I put half a can of Seafoam in the half tank of gas it had and drove it for about 20 minutes. the miss from the stuck injector completely disappeared. Pretty cheap tune up.
Watch this on an automobile... variation would work on bike! JMHO
""I took some pictures of some fuel lines that we have here at the shop so you can see what happens when ethanol breaks the liners inside of them down. It will eventually cause fuel line failure as you can see in the pictures. The newer fuel lines are "suppose" to be ethanol resistant and they do not have the liners in them, but only time will tell. The fuel lines in these pictures are really not that old, the one that is fully collapsed is a 2003 model. We have seen them do this within 3 years. Alot of it also depends on where you live and how much ethanol is in your local fuel supply. We have started testing fuel in the boats we service to see how much ethanol is in it and the most we have seen so far is about 5%.
I am also putting up a couple of pics of what happens with ethanol "phase separation". Ethanol absorbs the moisture out of the air and once it reaches a certain content, it separates. The shelf life of E-10 is roughly 90 days under ideal conditions.
The best advice I can give you is to check your fuel line to see if it has the liner in it and also the fuel lines on the engine. If the ones on the engine feel "soft, spongy, or gummy" you might want to have them checked by a service tech. If your main fuel line has the liner in it, replace it with a newer one that doesnt. Also if you do not have a water separating fuel filter, I would recomend installing one that uses a 10 micron filter. Always run some sort of fuel stabilizer and treatment such as Sea Foam, or brands that your engine manufacturer puts out. StaBil has come out with an ethanol treatment for marine applications recently but I have not seen any research that has been done with it, so I cannot tell you if its good or not.
I know in Arkansas, if the fuel pumps do not have labels on the pumps that say "This fuel may contain up to 10% ethanol", they cannot have ethanol in their gas. These are the only places I try to get my gas at now but they are becoming pretty rare. So you might check around with distributors and see if they have any stations that do not have ethanol in their gas.
Fuel line with liner in it....

Liner in the fuel line is starting to deteriorate and change colors

This is what happens to a fuel line that completly deteriorates from ethanol. The liner comes apart. It will also get into your fuel system of your engine.

Two examples of "phase separation".

(The gas below was only a couple of weeks old)
""There you have it , you decide..... Is it worth the cost for Sea- Foam?
Last edited by timberland; Nov 29, 2009 at 06:59 PM.
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