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leadless chicken ...



Leatherbiker  <leatherbiker@xxxxxxxxxxx> writes:

> On the basis that no question is a dumb question ....  remember the
> thread we had some time ago, before unleaded petrol was (more or less)
> phased out in the UK?  I noticed at a BP petrol station this evening
> that they now offer unleaded (95 and 98 octane) and something called
> leadfree (4 star).  Now to my linguistic mind, unleaded and leadfree
> are synonyous - or is there some subtle semantic difference I am
> missing here?  Or, were they left with an empty patch on the pumps and
> forced to invent some new term?

    The difference is that unleaded is designed to have no lead, whereas
I'm guessing that the "Leadfree 4 star" is LRP - Lead Replacement
Petrol, which is supposed to provide the valve seat protection of lead
but without using lead.

    Except that as it is apparently easy to overdose on the lead
substitutes (manganese?  potassium?) the petrol companies have taken the
"safe" route and not put quite enough in, with the result that LRP
doesn't provide enough protection at high speed or under high load, for
example towing a caravan on the motorway.

> More to the point, could or should we be using the four-star instead
> of the unleaded?

    LRP is something of an unkown quantity, which doesn't seem to do
what it was designed for anyway.  Sprints are designed to run on
unleaded, so that's what I use.

                Jim
- --
      jim@         ,'_            Even putting my Max Power baseball cap
  gillespie.org   / -.--.    ___  on backwards and cranking the
                 _\_  ~-.`--'_.-' subwoofer all the way round to 11
                / /\\    \--'_ \\ failed to produce any kicking sounds.
 '99 Sprint ST  \__/ `---'  \__/                          -- Mark Davies


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