Thursday 3 July 2014

Marine 16

We have never really been ones for treating our fuel. We always worked on the basis that using fuel rather than storing it was the key to a clean fuel system.

However we recently ran some fuel of "suspect" quality and the resulting smoke cloud from Naughty-Cal was a little on the embarrassing side. Even after running it through and diluting it with fresh fuel she was still not entirely happy.

So we bit the bullet and treated the tank with Marine 16 Diesel Fuel Complete. We have no reason to suspect diesel bug as the fuel filters are clean it was just poor quality fuel affecting the combustion process. At first there was no noticeable difference in the amount of smoke but slowly and surely as the treated fuel has been run through the system the smoke has decreased and she has run smoother, in fact noticeably smoother and easier.

The most remarkable difference was in how she ran at speed during the weekend run to West Stockwith. On the Saturday she ran OK but still seemed a little lack luster when compared to her usual performance, however on the Sunday on the way home she was a different beast again. Eager, fast, mean, she wanted to eat up those miles, quick onto the plane, accelerating at the first tweak of the throttle, we had our old Naughty-Cal back. 

We have now decided that we will treat our fuel in future given such a noticeable improvement in performance and  the vastly reduced smoke output. One look at the transom of the boat shows just how much soot has been blown out of the system. That really needs cleaning off when the props are changed at the weekend!!

We have only run about 100 litres of treated fuel through the system, according to the manufacturers literature the best results are achieved after about 400-500 litres of fuel have been run through the system so we might get better results yet!

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