Originally Posted By: Panzerman
Originally Posted By: JimPghPA
Don't mess with heat and a gas tank.
You can boil gasoline. It will not go off. I showed my son this camping.
It MIGHT not go off. WILL not go off is something of a stretch.
If you were camping you were presumably using a naked flame?
To demonstrate how to boil petrol?
To your son?
!!!!!!
One can of course get lucky.
OK Close Shave Petrol Story.....um...bit spoilt for choice, but I find this one hard to forget.
1800 Marina estate. Prequel to the repair described above. Filled up on the way home and the smell of petrol seemed more persistent than usual. Actually stopped to check, but it was dark and (of course) [censored] down and I couldn't see anything. Home late and forgot about it.
Next day woken by nosey neighbour who complains my car is leaking petrol down the street. Indeed. ALL the way down the street gutter, under lots of much shinier cars.
What to do? Have a couple of large jerricans, but have learned that siphoning petrol out of a tank really only works well in the movies. Decide to remove the tank and decant petrol directly.
EDIT: I'd better point out, for any petrol-boilers who might be reading, that most people would probably consider this was a somewhat dangerous thing to do, but everything is relative.ENDEDIT
Lying under the car in a small river of petrol, I'd unbolted the (still almost full) leaking tank and lowered it onto my chest, where it was soaking my overalls, and had just started to wriggle out with it, when the nosy neighbour (who'd complained about the leak in the first place) stuck her head down over the gutter to check on progress.
Did I mention she was a CHAIN SMOKER?
I couldn't look at first.
Then I looked and couldn't speak.
Then I spoke, but I had to be VERY polite to avoid agitatating the STUPID COW, since the ash didn't look very stable.
One of my nearer death experiences.