Blood on my hands at the diesel puimp!
 

Filled up at a Crown station in East Baltimore which generally has good prices on 40 cetane diesel, about eight PM Sunday night.

My hands felt wet, and when I looked down at my hands and the pump nozzle...they were COVERED in bright red BLOOD!

I carefully wiped my hands, and no fresh "blood" appeared...seems the pump had dispensed the diesel fuel containing a "red" dye...which I THOUGHT was added to home heating oil to keep it from finding its way into diesel vehicle fuel tanks.

For a moment I knew exactly how Jack Woltz felt...

ahhh! AHHH! AHHHHHHHH!

Johnny Fontaine can HAVE the damn part!

don't they dye diesel used in farming equipment as well? i believe it is illegal to put that in your car :)

If the fuel really was dyed, I hope you don't get stopped for a farm-diesel check (of course, in D.C. I can't imagine the police do too much of that). Is it also possible the last person to use the pump was using ATF as an additive and got some of that on the handle?

I've never heard of anyone in a diesel CAR being checked for off highway diesel. It's possible, just extremly unlikely.


I got in the habit ages ago of always picking up the pump handle with a rag or something. And I really like those places that have the plastic mits or towel dispensors at the pump. Of course in ragged ass NC the dispensors will be empty and the water in the windscreen washer fixture will be stagnated or empty.. :rolleyes:

Why ATF
 

I'm curious as to why would any Diesel owner add ATF as a fuel additive. Is there something I sholud be doing?

use a glove next time
 

I have noticed that in Europe they have a disposable glove dispenser next to diesel pump. That way your hand remains cleaner.

Re: Why ATF
 

for it's lubricating quality in the injectoin pump. I used it for years, I know a great many people that survived Kalifornias dirst shot at low sulfer diesel a few years back by using it regularly. It's said there are now additives and such in it that make it not so good for the injection pump, but I've seen no date to back that up.
I used it quite a lot in the VW's as it was cheap if not free most of the time. They would run quieter with it than without. I just use PowerService for now, but will eventually get back to mixing that with a lubricating fluid, ashless 2 cycle engine oil perhaps.

The Commonwealth of Virginia definitely has --
 

two years ago on I-64 east of Richmond they were waving Mercedes and VW cars which they thought might be diesels into the truck weigh station for fuel checks along with a lot of pick-up trucks.

It used to be the regular procedure according to VW factory diesel training to clean the injectors at every fuel filter change by filling the new fuel filter with ATF before it was to be installed on the car -- it was recommended that this be done only on a warm engine to make sure there were no problems restarting on the ATF, and the incoming fuel diluted it rather quickly, but it was said that it really cleaned the injectors well. Now they no longer recommend that, because the newer grades of ATF have too much synthetic high-temperature stuff to work well as diesel fuel.

I'd like to nominate this thread for the most dramatic titled thread in the history of the Diesel Discussion board. I initially thought you had exchanged gunfire with another diesel driver that tried to steal your spot at a low priced diesel pump :)

I thought TimFreeh had an unfortunate incident while working on his injector pump. I thought maybe there was something to be careful with when working on it.

I'll vote for that. I wasn't sure if he meant diesel pump or diesel pimp! I thought maybe they raised the price on him and he'd had it!

"Blood on my hands at the diesel puimp[sic]!"

Re: The Commonwealth of Virginia definitely has --
 

Wonder what reaction they would have if they pulled out vegi oil? :)

I always used the ATF trick on filter changes on my VW's, worked beautifuly. Shame they changed ATF..

They (the VA police) could smell something strange in my fuel
 

(30-40% peanut oil blended into road-taxed #2) but as long as it didn't react to the litmus type paper on a wand thingy they had as a test device, they didn't care. They did explain that their test doesn't depend on color but on some other chemical characteristic of the additive put in non-road taxed oil, so they didn't think that it would react to fuel which was slightly reddish from ATF (or AMSOIL racing 20-50, which has a red dye to mark that it's not the 25,000 mile type) either, but they weren't sure.