Help pleeeeeeease! Any mechanics?

[FieldDiscipline]

Please help me! I have done a terrible thing!

I'm moving house this weekend and I borrowed a van. I may have had problems with vehicles from the same source in the past... Last words to me were "Please dont break it, we need it back working on Monday".

Easy. Until I fill up with diesel, when its petrol.

Cue four hours of innefective syphoning and getting the fuel tank halfway off the vehicle.

In the end I got towed home, the tank is still missing a retaining strap. My question is this:

Tank pretty empty. I only added £7 worth of diesel so about 5 1/2 litres ish. If I refit the tank and just fill it to the brim with unleaded will it water it down enough to work ok? I cant afford (in both sense of the word) to get a garage to fix the problem and I still need to move, tommorow!

AAAAArrrgh!

Please help!

 

[terryl965]

FD sorry to hear this, I am no mechanic so I have no advice whatever. Hope somone here can help.

 

[FieldDiscipline]

Thanks Terry. I'm pretty sorry too! Perseverance and Indomitable spirit though huh?

 

[Sukerkin]

The key is to drain out as much of the diesel as you can. I don't know how much dis-assembly you feel up to but the best way to flush diesel out is with petrol.

If practical, disconnect the fuel lines where they enter the engine if you can and turn the van over a few times with petrol in the tank. That should pump out the goop (aka diesel). Clean the spark plugs if you managed to drive the van a bit before it died and you might need to replace the fuel filters.

If you had the good sense not to fire it up with diesel in the system then you're pretty much going to be okay with just draining out the wrong fuel and filling it up with petrol. As long as the ratio of petrol is very high she'll just run a bit smoky and might kangaroo a bit until it burns through.

The good news is that you shouldn't have really damaged anything, just gunked things up a bit. Diesel needs pressure and heat to ignite beyond what a petrol engine will provide i.e. it's combustion inert in a petrol engine.

 

[fireman00]

I'm not a mechanic so be forwarned... we had a guy vol. fire dept. fill one of our fire trucks (diesel engine) with about 30 gallons of gasoline.... it ran like crap for a couple of days but it burned through. If its an older van and most of what's in there is gasoline you should be ok - the van may smoke and sputter but diesel is combustible.

 

[Mr G]

When I was in Panama in the US Army, we "borrowed" a van/bus/coach sorta vehicle from Noriega. (It was air conditioned) Basically, it just sat still and idled keeping us cool. The only time it really moved was to go put more fuel in it. When we had to leave we gave it to our replacements and they filled it with Diesel when they should have used Gasoline. Typical grunt fashion, they elected to just run it till it died. After all, It wasn't theirs.... Anyway, it never died. It ran like **** until they burned off enough diesel to add more gas, but it kept running. We came by there again in a week or so, and it was still sitting there keeping troops cool.