4 Stroke Cleaner Than 2, Really?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wartburg_353

that is up till 1988


And yes 2-strokes suck as car engines. But their success in other applications has been quite different. They are gaining in popularity in off road motorcycle racing after a long trend of 4-strokes becoming more and more popular.

Its silly to call doom on certain technology just because. 2-smokes have their issues but if they can be solved there might be a very valuable place for them.
Remember when diesel cars were only smoking big slow piles of crap. Go to Europe today and its quite a different deal. I drive a tdi golf and I am very happy with its 45mpg and performance.

 

Fuel, oil and grease are all derived from the same product. Crude"

NOT so, for racing Castor oil was favored for close to a century as a superior lubricant. .

The old 2 stroke dumps oil into the water at different speeds because the charge is used for cooling and at some speeds tuned to increase the pressure on the exhaust ports . Differ from designed RPM , its less efficient.

Electric direct injection should cure this .

Requiring castor oil (or similar veggi product) in engines would simply add food to the waters food chain.


"And yes 2-strokes suck as car engines."

You have a problem with an engine with 7 moving parts that weighs half or less of a 4 stroke?

Lots have changed since the old SABB was common as a quick family car.

Mostly the Air Police and dreams of pre Eden utopias that never existed..

 

After taking many pix I got one where you can see what I can. Yes its a few two smokers but 97% of the running boats are 4 stroke on this lake.

What you see is on the lake from one end to the other.

 

One or few boats over there have an oil-leakage problem. Which one? The answer is imo not related to statistics, but very probably to one or few specific boats.
And yes, there are no clean fuel-burning engines. Just more or less polluting ones.

 

nobody mentioned two stroke ship diesels yet?

 

Perhaps because this thread is about boats on a small lake in Arkansas...

 

When the last 2-stroke engine disappears from the world, I will breath a huge sigh of relief!

You will probably be dead and buried for a century or two.,

Take a look at most big SHIP engines , 2 strokes , as well as the most efficient (HP vs fuel burn) on the planet. 10,000KW at 92 RPM.

The real question is how we can scale these super efficient engines down to operate our toy boats.

 

Unless you have that surface skim analyzed, you don't know what it is or where it came from. Natural decaying processes make an oily looking film on the water in many places, including in the water in front of my house. When it was first observed, I thought it must be from human sources but it is not so. Analysis showed it to be natural decay.

 

I was thinking engine oil on water is all sorts of colors depending on it's molecular thickness.

What you show just looks like crustiness from the lake bottom mud or something.

When you see this, this is suspicious...

 

To make a point, Photoshop is the way to go
But nothing beat the white Crocks

 

Some good points made, thank you for them.

Arkansas has some of the cleanest water in the world (don't tell anyone, population is to many now). Like SamSam said oil is rainbowed, and its engine oil. This is the middle lake of three in a row and you can build on it. Just a big party lake. The first lake in the chain is one cleanest in the world. I was just their and it no oil on its surface.

 

For what it's worth, whether clean and green or old school, there isn't an outbound out there that doesn't have oil in the gearcase. Let's say that just one ski boat skiing the length of the lake had a leaky gearcase, that boat would be spreading it's gear oil the length of the lake. Also remember most people only discover a leaky gearcase when it drips oil at home, or when it stops working in the water.

I was talking to an enviro - nazi at work one day. She hadn't realizedthat every single kilo of grease that gets pumped into the dump trucks and diggers in the mine ends up on the ground. I personally was going through nearly 1/2 tonne of grease in the service truck per day. The mine i was at had been going for what35 years at that point, how much grease had been "recycled" in this fashion and at the mine haulroads and dig floor, there was no sign of any spill.

As mentioned before, the earth cleans itself.

 

Love Canal, Chernobyl, Fukushima?

Really?

In 500 years on the same path we're on now this world will look like the city dump. Glad I don't have any off spring.

 

I wouldn't be surprised if all of a sudden the earth cleaned itself of humans.

 

My olfactory sense is very much confirmed in the view that 4-stroke is "cleaner". Two-stroke oil stinks. I doubt anything in it is harmless to health.