Petrol octaine history in aus

[castellan]

Does anyone know the history of Australian petrol octane ratings.

Standard and Super and maybe before them it was called something other.
I can't find anything on the web stating but for that in the UK super was 93 RON in 1954 and 95 RON in 1958 and 97 RON in 1963.

So i thought there may be a similar thing that happened hear in aus with our Standard and Super.

Did our Super go up to 98 and then down a bit before Unleaded fuel was only available.

[Yellow_Festiva]

If memory serves, super was higher than ULP. Perhaps around 94-96RON??

I remember reading an article on the lead additive once super was removed. It recommended using PULP as it was about the same RON as super.

Going back a while now... could be wrong.

[Ford_The_Win]

I thought super was for leaded cars only? I remember we always put super in our old cars up until when we got an unleaded car in the late '90s. There was definitely 'unleaded petrol' and 'leaded super' or am I imagining things?

[jpd80]

Leaded Super = RON 94
Leaded Standard = RON 87

Back in the 1940s and 1950s I believe that Standard grew from around RON 75 to RON 85

[burnz]

Originally Posted by jpd80

Leaded Super = RON 94
Leaded Standard = RON 87

Back in the 1940s and 1950s I believe that Standard grew from around RON 75 to RON 85

thats about right in octaine..

still remember the fuel shortage days running standard + kero to keep the car going..

[castellan]

Originally Posted by jpd80

Leaded Super = RON 94
Leaded Standard = RON 87

Back in the 1940s and 1950s I believe that Standard grew from around RON 75 to RON 85

That would explain why the FX holden only had only a 6.5:1 compression then went up to 7.25:1 in 1960.

[2011G6E]

"Super" was high octane, usually around 94 to 97 depending on the maker (back then, it really did make a difference which brand you used), "Standard" was lower, around the 91 mark. Ahh, I remember the good old days of taking one glance at your exhaust pipe after a good highway run and knowing immediately if your car was running well...a nice white-grey deposit in the pipe. And no, lead in petrol was never the evil it was made out to be. Lead, even in molecular form or tiny particulates as in exhaust, is heavy, and I remember figures showing the lead levels on the actual road, and a couple of meters away from the road, and it had dropped to way below dangerous levels by one or two meters off the road.
The real drop in lead levels in peoples blood came after the banned lead based solder in food tins and lead based house paints. Petrol was never a real problem.

I feel for guys with old Italian motorcycles and higher end performance cars like some Alfas and the like...thier pump fuel in the 1960's and 70's was leaded, and 115 octane...

My 1974 Kawasaki H2-750 two-stroke triple was the big daddy of bikes at the time...nothing could touch it, and no 750 could come close until the mid-1980's. However, it only had a factory compression ratio of 7:1. Mine has a bit more than that now , but even standard it was a fireball.

The sad thing is that because of our "small market" we get crap petrol. What we call "Premium" unleaded is "standard" unleaded in most other markets.

[irish2]

Originally Posted by castellan

That would explain why the FX holden only had only a 6.5:1 compression then went up to 7.25:1 in 1960.

Static compression and dynamic compression are two very different things. You are probably correct with your summation though.

[samftr]

wasnt the "lead" added in to protect valve seats and also provide an anti ping property too?

[flappist]

Originally Posted by 2011G6E

"Super" was high octane, usually around 94 to 97 depending on the maker (back then, it really did make a difference which brand you used), "Standard" was lower, around the 91 mark. Ahh, I remember the good old days of taking one glance at your exhaust pipe after a good highway run and knowing immediately if your car was running well...a nice white-grey deposit in the pipe. And no, lead in petrol was never the evil it was made out to be. Lead, even in molecular form or tiny particulates as in exhaust, is heavy, and I remember figures showing the lead levels on the actual road, and a couple of meters away from the road, and it had dropped to way below dangerous levels by one or two meters off the road.
The real drop in lead levels in peoples blood came after the banned lead based solder in food tins and lead based house paints. Petrol was never a real problem.

I feel for guys with old Italian motorcycles and higher end performance cars like some Alfas and the like...thier pump fuel in the 1960's and 70's was leaded, and 115 octane...

My 1974 Kawasaki H2-750 two-stroke triple was the big daddy of bikes at the time...nothing could touch it, and no 750 could come close until the mid-1980's. However, it only had a factory compression ratio of 7:1. Mine has a bit more than that now , but even standard it was a fireball.

The sad thing is that because of our "small market" we get crap petrol. What we call "Premium" unleaded is "standard" unleaded in most other markets.

You had a Mach IV? and lived????
I had a Mach III for about 2 months until it tried to kill me for the third time and I traded it on something that actually stopped and went around corners.....

[2011G6E]

Originally Posted by flappist

You had a Mach IV? and lived????
I had a Mach III for about 2 months until it tried to kill me for the third time and I traded it on something that actually stopped and went around corners.....

Still got a Mach IV...had it for fifteen years, was my first "big bike" (and I still lived... ) and it's still sitting in the shed quite happily, thank you very much...

[XD 351 Ute]

Hmm, standard and super....
My memories of them relate mostly to my Dad's service station at the time & one day we ran out of standard to wash parts in the workshop.
So i decided to try super out, and I think 30 odd years later the skin is still growing back on my hands.....

Ed

[GTB 351]

I saw on another forum that our 95 is roughly equivelent to the USA's 89 due to the different way we measure it. This explains why the engine masters guys could run nearly 12:1 comp on 91. Spent a long time scratchin my head as to how they got away with those comp ratios until I saw that.

[big_landau]

the new fuels go off very quickly,i have had fuel sit in a car for 6 months and its goes off and gums up the fuel lines etc but i have started cars with super in the tank that have sat for 20 years and they actually run on it with no probs.we are all paying big money but getting quite a crap quality of fuel nowdays.

[wrongwaynorris]

Originally Posted by samftr

wasnt the "lead" added in to protect valve seats and also provide an anti ping property too?

It all started prior to WW2 for aero engines and they added Tetraethyl Lead ( TEL ) to raise the octane rating to overcome detonation on supercharged engines , it was a bonus that it also cushioned the valve closings thus protecting the seats and valve faces .


Tetraethyllead was first discovered by a German chemist in 1854, but remained commercially unused for many years.[8] In 1921, TEL was found to be an effective antiknock agent by Thomas Midgley, working under Charles Kettering at General Motors Corporation Research.[9] General Motors patented the use of TEL as a knocking agent and called it "Ethyl" in its marketing materials, thereby avoiding the negative connotation of the word "lead".[8] By 1923, leaded gasoline was being sold.[10] In 1924, Standard Oil of New Jersey (ESSO/EXXON) and General Motors created the Ethyl Gasoline Corporation to produce and market TEL.

The toxicity of concentrated TEL was recognized early on, as lead had been recognized since the 19th century as a dangerous substance which could cause lead poisoning.[10] In 1924, a public controversy arose over the "loony gas" which the production created after several workers died and others went insane in a refinery in New Jersey and a DuPont facility in Ohio.[10] However, for two years prior to this controversy several public health experts including Alice Hamilton engaged Midgley and Kettering with letters warning of the dangers to public health of the proposed plan.[10] After the death of the workers, dozens of newspapers reported on the issue.[10][11] In 1925, the sales of TEL were suspended for one year to conduct a hazard assessment.[1][8]

The U.S. Public Health Service conducted a conference in 1925. The conference was initially expected to last for several days, but reportedly the conference decided that evaluating presentations on alternative anti-knock agents was not "its province" so it lasted a single day.[10] Kettering and Midgley stated that no alternatives for anti-knocking were available, although private memos showed discussion of such agents.[10] One commonly discussed agent was ethanol, although it was not as cheap.[10] The Public Health Service created a committee which reviewed a government-sponsored study of workers and an Ethyl lab test, and concluded that while leaded gasoline should not be banned, it should continue to be investigated.[10] The low concentrations present in gasoline and exhaust were not perceived as immediately dangerous. A U.S. Surgeon General committee issued a report in 1926 that concluded there was no real evidence that the sale of TEL was hazardous to human health but urged further study.[8] In the years that followed, research was heavily funded by the lead industry; in 1943, Randolph Byers found children with lead poisoning had behavior problems, but he was threatened with a lawsuit and the research ended.[10]

In the late 1920s, Dr. Robert Kehoe of the University of Cincinnati was the Ethyl Corporation's chief medical consultant. In 1928, Dr. Kehoe expressed the opinion that there was no basis for concluding that leaded fuels posed any health threat.[8] He convinced the Surgeon General that the dose–response relationship of lead was that of no effect below a certain threshold.[12] As the head of Kettering Laboratories for many years, Kehoe would become a chief promoter of the safety of TEL, an influence that did not begin to wane until about the early 1960s. But by the 1970s, the general opinion of the safety of TEL would change, and by 1976 the U.S. government would begin to require the phaseout of this product.

As early as the late 1940s and early 1950s, Clair Patterson accidentally discovered the pollution caused by TEL in the environment while determining the age of the earth. As he attempted to measure lead content of very old rocks, and the time it took uranium to decay into lead, the readings were made inaccurate by lead in the environment that contaminated his samples. He was then forced to work in a clean room to keep his samples uncontaminated by environmental pollution of lead. After coming up with a fairly accurate estimate of the age of the earth, he turned to investigating the lead contamination problem by examining ice cores from countries such as Greenland. He realized that the lead contamination in the environment dated from about the time that TEL became widely used as a fuel additive in gasoline. Being aware of the health dangers posed by lead and suspicious of the pollution caused by TEL, he became one of the earliest and most effective opponents of its use.[13] In the 1970s, Herbert Needleman found that higher blood levels in children were correlated with decreased school performance. Needleman was repeatedly accused of scientific misconduct by individuals within the lead industry, but he was eventually cleared by a scientific advisory council.[10]

In the U.S. in 1972, the EPA launched an initiative to phase out leaded gasoline based on a regulation under the authority of the Clean Air Act Extension of 1970. Ethyl Corp's response was to sue the EPA. Although the EPA's regulation was initially dismissed,[10] the EPA won the case on appeal, so the TEL phaseout began in 1976 and was completed by 1986. A 1994 study indicated that the concentration of lead in the blood of the U.S. population had dropped 78% from 1976 to 1991.[14]

By the year 2000, the TEL industry had moved the major portion of their sales to developing countries and lobbied governments to delay phasing out of the additive.[8] Leaded gasoline was withdrawn entirely from the European Union market on 1 January 2000, although it had been banned much earlier in most member states. It was phased out in China around 2001.[citation needed] In the United Kingdom a small amount of leaded gasoline ("four star petrol") is still permitted to be manufactured and sold,[citation needed] albeit with a higher rate of fuel duty. In Australia, owners of old cars that run on leaded petrol can buy leaded additives and mix them with octane 98 fuel (premium unleaded).

[aussie muscle]

Originally Posted by 2011G6E

Petrol was never a real problem.

unless you lived in a big city like L.A

[FrogInASock]

And in between Standard and Super was Caltex Ninety Two!

I recall a tale of adding ludicrous amounts of TEL to aviation petrol for Lancasters during the big disagreement of '39-'45. They got a reading of something like 140 octane for the (then) high performance Rolls Royce Merlins, and part of the tale was that the ground cres had to scrape the lead off the exhausts, so rich was the TEL mix.

[FTe342]

This could have been titled the "old farts' thread".

Some iconic brands have gone by the wayside, such as Golden Fleece etc (gee I wish I had one of those old petrol bowsers now!)

Wish I could fill the T for less than 10 shillings like the old man used to to fill the Zephyr, with the obligatory shot of Upper Cylinder Lubricant when filling the tank on pay day. Can't remember the name of that stuff

[Maggot]

This faq is not aus based.. but it is very detailed

http://www.webpak.net/~marriott/gasoline.htm

[flappist]

Originally Posted by Maggot

This faq is not aus based.. but it is very detailed

http://www.webpak.net/~marriott/gasoline.htm

Must be completely untrue propaganda.

It says thete there is 30 times as much Argon as Carbon Dioxide in air and we all know that the air is now 130% carbon dioxide and rising at 10% per day (plus GST and administration fees of course).........

Argon tax.....that is the go.....bloody welders....

[2011G6E]

When "Connie The Constellation" came to the Bundaberg Air Show a few years back (an old Super Constellation air liner), it did a run up the runway at low altitude and you could see the odd small flash of flame from the exhaust. They said that running on todays weaker octane Avgas, it could only produce about three-quarters the power it did when new.
They said with the 140+ octane fuel originally used in the massive supercharged 18 cylinder radials, at full throttle at takeoff sheets of flame four feet long would continually belch from the exhausts...

[Maggot]

This line from the FAQ...

The most famous of these is methylcyclopentadienyl manganese tricarbonyl (MMT), which was used in the USA until banned by the EPA from 27 Oct 1978 [18], but is approved for use in Canada and Australia.


.. reminds me of how US insurance companies started rejecting insurance for asbestos workers in 1912, 40 years before we really got started using it here.

[vztrt]

Originally Posted by Maggot

This line from the FAQ...

The most famous of these is methylcyclopentadienyl manganese tricarbonyl (MMT), which was used in the USA until banned by the EPA from 27 Oct 1978 [18], but is approved for use in Canada and Australia.


.. reminds me of how US insurance companies started rejecting insurance for asbestos workers in 1912, 40 years before we really got started using it here.

Kinda like MDF now.

[Peter B - CV8]

Originally Posted by FTe342

This could have been titled the "old farts' thread".

Some iconic brands have gone by the wayside, such as Golden Fleece etc (gee I wish I had one of those old petrol bowsers now!)

Wish I could fill the T for less than 10 shillings like the old man used to to fill the Zephyr, with the obligatory shot of Upper Cylinder Lubricant when filling the tank on pay day. Can't remember the name of that stuff

If it was from Golden Fleece - it was called "Firezone" & came in a miniture oil shaped bottle (the old glass oil bottles). I used to pull out the sparkplugs & squirt a bit into the combustion chamber. Leave it for a few hours & start up - instant smokescreen for a few minutes

[FGII-XR6]

Originally Posted by Peter B - CV8

"Firezone"

thats a real blast from the past I remember that one guess that shows just how mature ( I don't use the O word ) I am

[samftr]

I miss the days of old running super in the leaded vehicles and go on a bit of a trip up the highway and the exhaust would run grey all the carbon would be gorn

[bingoTE50]

My first job as a 14 yr old pumping fuel at a Ampol Servo . ( I think) We had to select either STD , 50/50 ,or Super on the bowser via a lever . The price would then change according to the mix . It had a placard made of sheet metal with the recommendations for certain makes and models..