Manganese additive in my gas..
 

After stopping at my local gas station for a liter of gas my bike started running poorly (lean)-the second time in a row after stopping at that station though it cleared up quickly the first time.

Normally you'd assume it was sediment from the station's tank-but it's a new gas station just a few months old.

I rode into town and ran into a friend who said gas from that station has manganese as one of its additives and it's know to cause problems. :eek:

I had noticed that whenever I spilled some of that gas onto the ground or had some gas film leftover drying out in a plastic cup, there would be blotches as it was nearly all dried out and hadn't seen that before with other gasoline.

So now I've switched to the only using gas from the Big 3 companies here in the Philippines that were even approved by VW for use in their cars. These stations use 10% ethanol, where I'd been told the 'other' station did not-though I heard later all stations in the Philippines must use ethanol in their gas. Maybe there's no law saying you have to post it on your pumps..

I did take my carb off and clean it, while it was apart I switched back to the 50 needle at 4th groove to be safe because now there's a mix of the old gas and new gas in there, and the bike was running great. I may have to go back to full rich or even the P8 if the ethanol requires richer jetting

Anyway, between now using gas from a different source and it has ethanol where maybe the other station did not... my 1/2 throttle test results efforts may have been for naught and I may need to test again

:D

I think what he may be talking about is MMT(Methylcyclopentadienyl Manganese Tricarbonyl). It is an additive used as an octane booster that was introduced in the 70's when lead was being phased out of use in gasoline. Most testing showed that it may produce some deposits on the plug that could result in a misfire after long term use but for the most part it didn't cause any loss of performance.

Maybe that's it. I just talked to him again a few minutes ago and he said VW tested gasolines in the Philippines and even so they stopped importing gas engined vehicles in case an owner was to use other brands and blame it on VW itself.

Then perhaps the almost new tanks have sediment. I guess it's good not to go on a day fuel was delivered? After having running troubles twice in a row from there I need to look at other stations anyways.

But there have been cases here where a station owner actually added water to his tanks to increase profits, but it all backfired when people's vehicles started running poorly immediately after leaving the station.

Much like I experienced come to think of it