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Chainsaw Massacred
September 13, 2012
Like most Americans, I don't pay that much attention to things until they hit me in the nose. It's one of the big reasons that we are saddled with the government that we have now. If most people had to attend City Council, county commissioner or, God forbid, school board meetings regularly, this country would be a different place.
But we don't. So instead we work, play tennis, golf, watch TV or local sports, read, garden, walk, run or clean. For most of us paying attention to the government is demoralizing and depressing. We'd rather wash the car. We want to eat the sausage but we sure don't want to watch anyone make it.
Or at least that's my excuse for letting this ethanol thing slip past me. This spring my weed-eaters, my chainsaw, my lawnmower, my tiller and my chipper-shredder have all been in the shop. In short, just about everything I own with a gasoline powered motor other than my truck has been in the shop for repairs. It seemed odd to me that everything I had was having similar problems and I thought perhaps I had gotten a tank of bad gas. That happened to me with a car once and it seemed to take forever for the stuff to get out of the system. Anyway, since I hadn't filled everything at the same time or from the same gas can, that didn't seem to make sense and I started asking questions.
I was a philosophy major not an engineer. I consider successfully putting the chain back on a chainsaw a major accomplishment. By the same token I've been working with small gas motors since I started cutting lawns in the neighborhood when I was 11 or 12, so I have some experience.
But when I started asking questions I found out that small gas engine, and in particular two-stroke engines such as in most chainsaws, were really taking a beating with the new ethanol gasoline blend that is mandated by the federal government.
It is one of these ridiculous "green" initiatives. Some folks say that burning ethanol is worse than gasoline. It doesn't produce the same pollutants as gasoline, so if there is a problem with pollutants from gasoline they will be reduced, but it is not clean burning. It just produces different pollutants. What it does do is mess up small motors.
Ron Clark at Clark Farm Supply explained that ethanol and gasoline mix but never combine. It's like oil and water in a lot of ways. You can shake it around and get it all mixed up, but if it sits for any length of time the two separate. And burning pure ethanol, he said, creates too much heat for these small motors.
In my chainsaw the piston ring melted. When I heard that I thought it was because I had forgotten to mix oil with the gasoline. But since none of the other two-cycle engines that I had filled from the same gas can blew up, I thought that was unlikely. What I'm told is more likely is that because I don't use my chainsaw every week, the ethanol and gasoline had separated, and I didn't spend 20 minutes shaking my chainsaw before I started it up.
Producing ethanol has also raised the price of corn to the point that it has increased the cost of food and made life harder for the poor and those who work to feed the poor.
Some people claim that making ethanol from corn takes more energy than it produces, so it is a net loss. Others say it is a net energy gain, but not much of one. But the bottom line on all of that is that the government has to subsidize ethanol for it to be viable. It appears to just be another government program run amuck. It was supposed to help with US energy independence, but it takes so much energy just to make ethanol it's hard to believe it really makes much difference. And what is it costing this nation in repairs to small motors?
It seems that the very least the government could do is give people a choice at a reasonable price. I've been advised that there are some additives that help, but after having every toy I own break down, it seems a little late. And it is definitely too late for my chainsaw, which had cut a lot of trees and had never cut me, which is really all you can ask for from a chainsaw.