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Posted by David Sherman [216.18.131.99] on Sunday, December 13, 2009 at 12:46:00 :
In Reply to: Gas Additives posted by Ang [205.188.116.76] on Sunday, December 13, 2009 at 10:00:22 :
As others have said, the obvious thing to check first is the timing. No need to get fancy -- just go to a place where you know it will ping, usually a long hill that you run with the throttle wide open, make sure it pings, then loosen the distributor, turn it in the direction that slows down the engine slightly (retarded), and try the hill again. You should be able to find a point where it doesn't ping and it still runs good. When you get home, you can use the timing light and see what you came up with.
I used to do this regularly on my 67 Chevy pickup when I would go back and forth to the coast. For some reason, I could run with more advance on Idaho gas than on Washington "clean air" gas. If I was going to be in Idaho a while, I'd advance the timing until it almost knocked, to get maximum power, and then if I had to fill up with Washington gas, I'd usually end up retarding it when I went over the mountains. Kept a 1/2" open-end wrench on the dashboard for just that reason.
This assumes it really is a spark knock you're hearing, not a rod knock, piston slap, or sloppy valve adjustment. I highly doubt that any gas additive would make a difference. This is a very low compression engine that should run fine on any sort of gasoline, even a gasahol blend. I have an old engineering handbook that lists ordinary grades of gasoline as being in 60-70 octane range, and identifies 87 octane as "fighting grade aviation gasoline" (as opposed to the lower octane training grade).
There's some interesting history about alcohol and gasoline around about 1940. Ford thought that petroleum would be used up soon and for his car business to grow, they'd have to start running the engines on alcohol, whereas GM banked on more oil being discovered, which led to Mr. Kettering's high-compression engines. In the early days, it wasn't uncommon to mix alcohol with gasoline, for those who had a source of cheap alcohol. Model Ts would run on an alcohol/gasoline mixture, or even an alcohol/kerosene mixture back when kerosene was cheaper than gasoline.
I agree that modern gas is different from what the 230s were suckled on as infants, but they should run fine on fuels that would make a modern engine barf. To get a spark knock in a 230 that was properly timed, you'd need to raise the compression dramatically, which would require not only an unusually tight engine but a lot of carbon build-up. Those two things don't usually go together.
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