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I have also posted this on a related-but-not-boats enthusiasts' site and I make no apology for doing so. In this case, website envy is uncalled for, and all 2-stroke guys need to show solidarity:
A fellow I know got into racing shifter karts this last summer. Like me, he lives on the outskirts of southeast Seattle, but he was doing all of his racing at the other end of the state, in the Spokane area, making for a long, tiresome drive. I asked if there were any shifter kart races out here, like maybe at Pacific Raceways, a big old sportscar/roadrace/drag/dirtbike track, also on the outskirts of southeast Seattle. He said, "Pacific has shifter karts, and I'd love to race there, but they don't allow 2-strokes."
This is happening all over. There are more and more lakes that don't allow 2-stroke outboard motors. People who know nothing about 2-strokes, especially in government and among the "greens," all have been telling each other that 2-strokes are massively polluting the environment. I read of one of these self-appointed "experts," a nice young woman from the environmentalist movement, a person who had never changed a sparkplug or had a speck of grease under her sensibly-short nails, testifying before Congress as an expert witness saying that legislation was needed to outlaw "filthy two-stroke engines."
Of course, this earnest, well-intentioned sweetheart actually didn't know a single thing about 2-strokes, and had probably never even heard of them before she read one of the anti-2-stroke articles, all reproducing the same set of bogus statistics and wild misinformation, that have been floating around the green movement for years. And any gearhead knows how this got started. Sixty years ago, 2-stokes could be pretty bad. They ran basically 30wt oil ("bunker C") at 20:1, 16:1, even 12:1, and de-carboning the exhaust port was a regular maintenance item . . . if the owner happened to be savvy enough to really DO any maintenance. Outboard motors had a little 1/16" bleed hole in the lower crankshaft oil seal that let excess oil drain out of the crankcase and into the lake when the engine was at trolling speeds. The blue haze was easy enough to see, back then.
But today we run high-tech 2-stroke oils at 80:1, 100:1, even 120:1 in our outboards, chainsaws, weedeaters, and in our bikes/sleds/quads. Any carbon buildup in the exhaust port is slow and minimal. Fishing motors no longer have the oil-bleed hole, it having been replaced in the late '60s to early-'70s with oil recirculators. Yet our engines are still criminalized as "filthy."
Unfortunately, Hapless Harry Homeowner buys a weedeater but never reads the owner's manual. After using it the first time, running very clean on modern oil and fresh gas, he then leaves in in the shed for weeks, with the pre-mix oil falling out of suspension to the bottom of the fuel, with the lighter "igniter" fuel fractions evaporating away, and with the deteriorated gas (gasohol) absorbing condensation from the inside of the half-empty fuel tank and crudding-up the tiny fuel passages and screens in the little pumper carburetor.
So when Hapless Harry goes to weedwhack the next time, which he does without shaking up the de-mixed premix that's in the tank, he first has an awful time getting the machine to start at all. If it does start, it smokes like mad because the carburetor is running rich due to its jets and screens being partly gummed with the cruddy fuel, and also because it is drawing a very oil-rich mixture from the bottom of the tank. If Harry's luck is really bad, the engine will sieze after it has run through the oil-rich fuel at the bottom of the tank and got to the oil-lean mixture that's left. And like every one of these dopes, he will tell you, "TWO-STROKES!! I HATE TWO-STROKES!! TWO-STROKES ARE CRAP!! Ironic, isn't it? In the hands of a clueless general public, the mechanically-simplest, lightest, least-expensive, and handiest engine option we have becomes an object of hatred. And the (largely) college Liberal Arts majors with their soft, pink, clean hands, the class of people who are very heavily represented both in all levels of governments and their bureaucracies, and in the green movement, all are very sure that every 2-stroke engine is an undesirable, smoke-belching relic of the past that should be outlawed and consigned to a museum.
And so, we lose our lakes, our trails, our race sites, our simple machines.
What I want to know is whether anyone has seen one of these 2-stroke bans being successfully fought against by our side, and how this was done. Or if anybody has any practical ideas (say, somebody in the marketing or P.R. biz, or in government) on how this might be done.
A fellow I know got into racing shifter karts this last summer. Like me, he lives on the outskirts of southeast Seattle, but he was doing all of his racing at the other end of the state, in the Spokane area, making for a long, tiresome drive. I asked if there were any shifter kart races out here, like maybe at Pacific Raceways, a big old sportscar/roadrace/drag/dirtbike track, also on the outskirts of southeast Seattle. He said, "Pacific has shifter karts, and I'd love to race there, but they don't allow 2-strokes."
This is happening all over. There are more and more lakes that don't allow 2-stroke outboard motors. People who know nothing about 2-strokes, especially in government and among the "greens," all have been telling each other that 2-strokes are massively polluting the environment. I read of one of these self-appointed "experts," a nice young woman from the environmentalist movement, a person who had never changed a sparkplug or had a speck of grease under her sensibly-short nails, testifying before Congress as an expert witness saying that legislation was needed to outlaw "filthy two-stroke engines."
Of course, this earnest, well-intentioned sweetheart actually didn't know a single thing about 2-strokes, and had probably never even heard of them before she read one of the anti-2-stroke articles, all reproducing the same set of bogus statistics and wild misinformation, that have been floating around the green movement for years. And any gearhead knows how this got started. Sixty years ago, 2-stokes could be pretty bad. They ran basically 30wt oil ("bunker C") at 20:1, 16:1, even 12:1, and de-carboning the exhaust port was a regular maintenance item . . . if the owner happened to be savvy enough to really DO any maintenance. Outboard motors had a little 1/16" bleed hole in the lower crankshaft oil seal that let excess oil drain out of the crankcase and into the lake when the engine was at trolling speeds. The blue haze was easy enough to see, back then.
But today we run high-tech 2-stroke oils at 80:1, 100:1, even 120:1 in our outboards, chainsaws, weedeaters, and in our bikes/sleds/quads. Any carbon buildup in the exhaust port is slow and minimal. Fishing motors no longer have the oil-bleed hole, it having been replaced in the late '60s to early-'70s with oil recirculators. Yet our engines are still criminalized as "filthy."
Unfortunately, Hapless Harry Homeowner buys a weedeater but never reads the owner's manual. After using it the first time, running very clean on modern oil and fresh gas, he then leaves in in the shed for weeks, with the pre-mix oil falling out of suspension to the bottom of the fuel, with the lighter "igniter" fuel fractions evaporating away, and with the deteriorated gas (gasohol) absorbing condensation from the inside of the half-empty fuel tank and crudding-up the tiny fuel passages and screens in the little pumper carburetor.
So when Hapless Harry goes to weedwhack the next time, which he does without shaking up the de-mixed premix that's in the tank, he first has an awful time getting the machine to start at all. If it does start, it smokes like mad because the carburetor is running rich due to its jets and screens being partly gummed with the cruddy fuel, and also because it is drawing a very oil-rich mixture from the bottom of the tank. If Harry's luck is really bad, the engine will sieze after it has run through the oil-rich fuel at the bottom of the tank and got to the oil-lean mixture that's left. And like every one of these dopes, he will tell you, "TWO-STROKES!! I HATE TWO-STROKES!! TWO-STROKES ARE CRAP!! Ironic, isn't it? In the hands of a clueless general public, the mechanically-simplest, lightest, least-expensive, and handiest engine option we have becomes an object of hatred. And the (largely) college Liberal Arts majors with their soft, pink, clean hands, the class of people who are very heavily represented both in all levels of governments and their bureaucracies, and in the green movement, all are very sure that every 2-stroke engine is an undesirable, smoke-belching relic of the past that should be outlawed and consigned to a museum.
And so, we lose our lakes, our trails, our race sites, our simple machines.
What I want to know is whether anyone has seen one of these 2-stroke bans being successfully fought against by our side, and how this was done. Or if anybody has any practical ideas (say, somebody in the marketing or P.R. biz, or in government) on how this might be done.
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