Distilling Stale Gasoline - Terrifyingly Satisfying (and easy)

Added: 2026-06-04

[00:00:00]What's up everyone? Welcome to lowered expectations. Thanks for lowering your expectations and hanging out with me here. I do appreciate it. I have managed to screw up one of the steps in the baline experiment. That's where I'm trying to turn bacon fat or lard into something that resembles gasoline so I can run it in my lawnmower. And so instead of sitting around and twiddling my thumbs, I've decided that I am going to answer another question that has made me quite curious. And that is a question about stale gasoline and whether or not I can bring it back to life. I am a small engine mechanic. I spend my days going around fixing people's lawnmowers and more and more over the past couple of years, I have seen people having issues with gasoline going stale. We are going to go and have a little chat with we're going to jump in a time machine and uh Joel is going to uh talk to you guys about the fuel that we're actually using. I was out doing a service call on a pressure washer and the fuel in it was absolutely nasty. I don't know if you guys have ever experienced old fuel, but it doesn't smell at all like gasoline and it changes color. The stuff that was in the carburetor was a green color. The stuff that was in the tank was kind of a a yellow. Anyway, I've got some of that in the pump in my truck and I've decided I'm going to try distilling it and see if I can get something from that that I can run on my lawnmower. And I think there's a pretty good chance of it. I think basically what we're going to do probably is leave a bunch of varnish and nasty stuff that is oxidized behind in the flask and we'll probably get basically gasoline but with some nasty stuff stripped out of it. But uh we're going to find out. This is what the gasoline looks like in a jar. Not ideal.

[00:02:06]It's not nearly as bad as I thought it would be. I kind of almost want to find some stuff that's worse. I do have pales of gasoline over here that I could use.

[00:02:16]This is another cup of gasoline that I got from a container of waste gasoline or old stale gasoline. And I'm tempted to do a spark test, but I believe my sparker got left out in the snow. Fresh gasoline will as soon as you take a drop of it if you touch it to the bench. See how it's kind of spreading out. Fresh gasoline would kind of rock it out and expand very quickly. This stuff looks oily and it's just not evaporating very fast. So, what I'm going to do, I'm going to take a lighter and at first just make some sparks by it. See if it lights.

[00:03:01]Okay. It's not lighting.

[00:03:05]Not lighting just from the spark. So, I'm going to hold the flame to it.

[00:03:11]Yeah. So, you can see if that was fresh gasoline, it would absolutely be lighting and I'm having a very hard time to keep it burning.

[00:03:21]So, yeah. That that shows you guys that this is not good fresh gasoline. very oily.

[00:03:31]Now that that part of the explanation is out of the way, we have the apparatus set up. We have about 44 g of aluminum oxide inside of the flask with the gasoline and that is going to act as a catalyst as well as a supplement or replacement for boiling chips. The idea of boiling chips, I believe it gives a nuculation site for the bubbles or the boiling to start occurring and so you don't get what they call bumping where it all heats up uniformly and then you get one big burp which is definitely not ideal because it can shoot product up through the column and uh it's quite unsettling especially if you're boiling something like gasoline. So, what the um what the aluminum oxide will hopefully do, and I've used it a couple of times now, and it seems to work really well, is actually make the product or the stuff in the boiling flask boil at a nice steady rate. And even when it boils aggressively, it won't bump and kind of well, make you poo your pants.

[00:04:42]I'm not going to lie, I'm actually quite nervous doing this. I think I'll get comfortable after doing it for a little bit. But basically, I am going to set an alarm on my thermostat so that it lets me know when the temperature of the gasoline is up to, let's say, 40° C uh in the flask. And then we have another sensor at the top of the column.

[00:05:08]And I'll probably set it for 30°.

[00:05:13]Uh currently we are reading 20° at the top of the column and 17 at the flask.

[00:05:20]So going to monitor flask flask temperature very carefully.

[00:05:26]So we definitely I definitely don't want anything to go wrong with gasoline in there.

[00:05:36]As you guys can see, we just hit 40° C.

[00:05:41]And we can see that the aluminum oxide is turnurning up in the fuel a little bit. Not sure how well the camera can pick up on that, but you can kind of see stuff circulating around in there. I've set an alarm for 25° C at the top of the column. And I am going to go now and set an other alarm for 50° C uh on the flask because I want to keep a very close eye on this temperature. We are up to 61° C on the flask and 21 at the top of the column. I don't think I mentioned this, but it is fairly late in the evening and tonight is kind of just a experiment to see where this actually starts boiling. So, I'm working my way up slowly, but I don't expect to get any amount of product over tonight. We'll see what happens. You can see we already have a little bead of something for forming on the thermometer there.

[00:06:48]So, we have some stuff in there that is fairly low boiling point, but the fact that we aren't getting a steady boil and we're already at 65 Celsius indicates to me that there's not a lot of stuff in there. There might be some stuff that's lower boiling point, but if there was a whole lot of stuff that was lower boiling point, we would actually see it bubbling away. Maybe I'm completely wrong about that, but uh that's the way I look at it.

[00:07:42]All right, folks. It's starting to jump up pretty quickly at the top of the column. We hit 70° C and now all of a sudden we're getting a spike here.

[00:07:54]And it looks like we're getting our first distillate over at 30 Celsius. You can see it's starting to condense and run through here.

[00:08:05]So that is good news. That is quite interesting. The temperature of the flask is now stabilizing around 70. I didn't touch the dial.

[00:08:15]So 7071 Celsius and the temperature at the top of the column is going up.

[00:08:23]And we're starting to see stuff come over.

[00:08:26]Very cool.

[00:08:29]Just what I wanted to see. Didn't expect it to happen this way, but very happy.

[00:08:38]That's in real time, folks. This footage is not sped up. We are at 52 degrees Celsius at the top of the column and we are getting a lot of product coming over at this temperature.

[00:08:56]That's great news because this means that we very likely have a fairly large amount of low boiling point uh distillate. So, that should run well in my mower, although it could stop coming over at any time. But we are pretty steady at 71 Celsius on the flask and 53 Celsius at the top of the column.

[00:09:26]This makes me very happy.

[00:09:32]Look how clear it is.

[00:09:36]I've got to say what I find interesting about this distillation is how much product we're collecting compared to how much is refluxing or how much is condensing in the column and actually falling back in.

[00:09:54]You can see there's hardly anything at all dripping back in. Very little dripping back in. So most of the vapors aren't even condensing here. We've got almost no condensing in this crossover tube.

[00:10:13]And almost all of the condensing is actually happening here in our condenser.

[00:10:21]You can see quite a bit of stuff condensing on the walls there. It's kind of hard to see because it's looking through two layers of glass and a layer of water or a column of water. Holy that's a lot of clear liquid. Look at that beautiful, beautiful stuff. And we are still at a relatively low temperature. We're up to 63 Celsius, but right in that same range, we've been kind of between 59 and 63. I'll try to remember to put a picture of the graph, the thermometer graph up on the screen here, but 84 Celsius on the flask and 63 the drip rate still pretty impressive. Still coming over about two drips per second.

[00:11:13]Unfortunately, it is about 11:30 p.m.

[00:11:16]and I am going to go in for the evening.

[00:11:18]So, I'm going to shut this down. I am really excited about this. This is freaking awesome. I have a couple hundred lers of gasoline, I think, that has oil in it. Some of stuff has been used to clean, you know, engine parts and whatnot. I would absolutely put that in my lawn mower. Now, as it is, a lot of this is probably like, you know, not going to have a lot of oomph to it. So, it'll probably ignite very easily, but it's probably not going to have the same power that it would if I don't collect some higher temperature distillate as well. So, we are going to continue on with this tomorrow. I am I don't know.

[00:12:05]I'm super excited. I'm not going to be able to sleep. This is awesome. It is the afternoon of Sunday, April 26. I'm just watching a fresh Jay Dalton video where he picked himself up a couple of new gas gas bikes. That's pretty awesome. Uh anyway, I think we are about to start collecting a new fraction because the temperature of the flask is going up, but the temperature of the top of the column is actually going down.

[00:12:34]Well, it was going down. So, I think what we're going to see now is something else coming over. What we're going to do is we're going to take this and put it in this can.

[00:12:47]Uh, but I'm going to measure it out first. Try not to spill a whole lot.

[00:12:53]Oh my goodness, that's so nice and clear.

[00:13:03]There's 150 milliliters.

[00:13:10]There's 250 milliliters, which is one cup.

[00:13:17]And there's another uh 25.

[00:13:25]I can see lots of fumes coming off this, so that's great news.

[00:13:30]We have up to 64 Celsius and we have uh 275 milliliters.

[00:13:39]Can I Oh, yeah.

[00:13:43]Oh, sweet. That's satisfying. If this comes off all in one piece without leaving any glue residue behind. The temperature at the top of the column is jumping around quite a bit as you guys can see.

[00:14:01]We're up to 80° Celsius. It looks like it might be settling somewhere around here. So, our next fraction or our next major fraction might be somewhere around 80° C. You can see it's starting to come over at a pretty decent rate. The temperature is jumping up and down quite a bit.

[00:14:24]Uh to the point where it actually goes below 60. I should say that although I collected this fraction separately, I'm doing this more out of curiosity and yeah, so that I don't end up with a flask that is overflowing. But basically, whatever we collect, we are going to put back into this can so that we have something that still resembles gasoline. If I were to just use this fraction, this is quite a bit of a lighter fraction. and it would probably run in my lawn mower, but uh it's not going to have as much oomph. It's going to ignite very easily, but uh it's not going to make nearly as much power uh just because, well, I think that's the way it works. Anyway, those of you who haven't been following the series, I am trying to make gasoline or a gasoline like product out of bacon fat. And we've been making quite a bit of progress. I said at the first of the video that I had a bit of a mess up. I had the idea a couple of months ago to try to run my lawnmower all year or all summer on fuel that I've made. And I kind of don't know if this is fair, but also I mean it wasn't fuel that I would have put in anything and now I wouldn't be afraid to put this in my vehicle.

[00:15:53]At the very least, we're going to burn it in something. Probably my lawn mower along with some baline.

[00:16:02]This was plastic bags and bottle caps, these two. And all the rest of this is one 5gallon pail.

[00:16:13]Some more time has relentlessly passed, as it seems to do, no matter how much we try to stop it. And the temperature seems to be hovering around this now. It did go up very close to 100 Celsius for a while. As you guys can see, 122 on the flask. Something that I kind of forgot to mention earlier is that this the mantle has basically been set at the same temperature since I started this test. So I haven't turned up the heat on the mantle and the distillate temperature is simply increasing or the temperature at the top of the column is simply increasing due to the different fractions coming over.

[00:17:05]I know this from watching other people's videos and I know why it does it, but it's very interesting to see in real life.

[00:17:38]down.

[00:17:42]You can do it now.

[00:17:56]As you guys can see from that graph, we collected somewhere between 80° C and 100. I'm going to call it 80° to 95 kind of as an average. The temperature did spike up a little bit there, but we're kind of going to ignore some of that. A nice little hiss when I open this can.

[00:18:17]Dealing with the gasoline is more pleasant than dealing with bacon fat or candle wax.

[00:18:25]The smells aren't nearly as intense.

[00:18:30]All right. How much of this did we collect? There's 150 milliliters. So in total 180 milliliters at this fraction and as you guys can see the dripping has basically completely stopped.

[00:18:52]So I might actually have to turn the temperature up on the mantle just a tad.

[00:18:58]That was a perfectly clear liquid. Very pleased with that.

[00:19:04]Very, very pleased. I'm actually going to leave the temperature set where it is and see if we get anything coming over without actually making any changes.

[00:19:16]I waited 5 minutes and there was no change. So, I did end up turning the heat on the mantle up. As you guys can see, we are now up to 129 Celsius. And well, we just came down from 110 to 109 at the top of the column and we have a lot coming over. You can see we've already collected a whole bunch of distillate at this fractioner at this temperature. So very cool. It is still going well. I looked back at some footage that I just transferred to my computer and I look at this very regularly. I'm keeping a very close eye on it. So, I didn't notice how much the level had actually dropped in the flask, but originally it was way up to like here.

[00:20:06]Anyway, just thought that was interesting. All right, folks. It looks like we are now collecting another fraction once again. So, we are now up to well, somewhere around 120° C.

[00:20:22]Let's see what we have here. Quite a bit again.

[00:20:26]Okay, just hold on, buddy. I got to do some things here. Florence needs in the house. I guess she just came and saw me here in the bus. So, that's 150.

[00:20:44]Oh, wow.

[00:20:46]150 and 75.

[00:20:49]Where is my paper towel? Okay, let's just got to let the cat in the house, then we'll come sort this out. All right, folks. I've cranked the heat up on the mantle quite a bit. And we now have distillate coming over, or rather the temperature at the top of the column is about 160 Celsius, 173 in the boiling flask. And we don't have a whole lot of material left.

[00:21:17]Part of me wants to not boil this dry and actually just add more gasoline and continue on with this for the next couple of days. But another part of me feels like because I'm making this video, I need to boil this dry and see what we're left with. Or maybe not boil it dry, but at least get it up to like 250 or 260 C. I'm not sure how well the camera actually picks this up, but now that we're boiling over higher temperature fractions, the distillate is actually coming over a little bit yellow. It's still fairly clear, but it has a little bit of a yellow tint to it.

[00:22:11]All right, folks. I think I'm actually going to call it or at least I'm going to take this distillate and dump it into there and call that our yield because it's starting to get more yellow and I don't like that. I've cranked up the heat on the mantle and we're not boiled dry yet, but it's starting to look syrupy.

[00:22:39]And we are 194 Celsius on the flask, 164 on the uh pardon me, 164 at the top of the column. The fuel rate is coming over still reasonably well. Once we mix this in with the other stuff, it's not going to look terribly yellow because, well, this doesn't look super yellow and it's going to be diluted in with stuff that is very, very clear. But I don't want to stubbornly collect every last drop that I can and end up with trash coming over.

[00:23:20]So, what I'm going to do is Yeah, I'm going to collect this. We'll see how much uh we actually end up with and then I'll continue collecting until we're almost boiled dry, but we might not use the rest of whatever it is we collect. I'm not sure what kind of yield we're going to get. We started off with one liter, but to be fair, some of that one liter would have been oil because I use that same pump to collect oil and gasoline.

[00:23:55]Um, so yeah. Anyway, shut up, Joel. Just do your thing.

[00:24:00]Yeah, this stuff's starting to smell a little bit more like oil.

[00:24:09]150 ms. Okay.

[00:24:21]200 in total. 50 and 50. Yeah, we've got we've got quite a bit.

[00:24:30]Very cool.

[00:24:32]That's probably enough to cut my lawn like three or four times. After that last clip, I actually decided to shut the distillation down. And I did that for a few reasons, but the main one being that it just doesn't make any sense to burn this stuff up and make my flask all nasty. If we stop at this point, we might actually be able to pour this stuff out and inspect it and see what it is. And another good reason to stop now is I did the math on this and we've actually collected 880 ml of fuel and we started off with one liter, meaning that there is only 120 ml of stuff left in here. So less than a/4 of a cup of material left. I highly suspect again that that is engine oil, a large percent of it. And then we're also going to end up with sludge and all sorts of nasty stuff from, you know, oxidized fuel and polymerized stuff. I'm talking like I know what I'm talking about. But yeah, we'll just have to take a closer look at this once it cools off. We'll pour it out, check the viscosity, check see if there's any lub lubricity, and uh maybe we can determine what it is.

[00:25:51]All right, folks. This has mostly cooled off. And what we are left with is well, a bunch of the aluminum oxide sitting in the bottom. And then this stuff that is quite dark. I'm actually going to pour it off into this bottle. Partly to see how much there is.

[00:26:12]partly so that we can check the viscosity and kind of play with it a little bit.

[00:26:21]It is still fairly warm and I can tell right now based on the viscosity that it's not all oil, that's for sure.

[00:26:36]Whatever this stuff is is obviously a mixture of different things.

[00:26:43]It smells very much like an overheated engine oil.

[00:26:48]And well, that's probably largely what it is. I am going to try to light it on fire just uh in the top of the can here and see if it ignites. For those of you who watched my uh bacon fat transformed into gasoline video, you will know that I was able to get the bacon fat distillate to ignite just with a spark. I assume this is going to have a hard time to light even with a flame.

[00:27:21]And it might not even stay lit, but I don't know.

[00:27:27]Yeah. So, it won't even light with a flame.

[00:27:32]Uh, if I pour it onto paper towel or something like that, I'm sure it would ignite, but uh I'm going to touch it with my fingers now or with these gloved fingers and see.

[00:27:48]Yeah, definitely has some lubricity to it.

[00:27:52]I'm saying fairly high percentage of this is actually engine oil.

[00:28:03]You can see it's definitely not drying up or evaporating away. We're now going to check to see how it burns on a piece of paper towel. I assume this test will go a whole lot better.

[00:28:16]Yeah, it's burning burning much more like Yeah, a mix of engine oil and diesel.

[00:28:27]It's uh burning with a lot of soot. You see a lot of smoky soot there.

[00:28:36]And uh yeah.

[00:29:07]Yeah. Not not terribly flammable, obviously.

[00:29:22]I would very much like to test this in something, but I don't think that anyone really questions whether or not gasoline that's been distilled over will still work as gasoline. Basically, we've just distilled it over and cleaned it up. got rid of all the nasty impurities, oil and uh just probably polymers and nasty oxides, stuff that oxidized um from the gasoline sitting around. Uh you chemist people can tell me what we probably have when gasoline goes bad and uh what we've actually done here. If you were paying attention in my last video, if you saw the last video where I ran waste engine oil that was distilled in my lawnmower, I did mention that I actually use some distilled gasoline to clean out the bacon fat or boline distilled bacon fat that I ran in this lawnmower. So, I did run a second batch.

[00:30:21]Um, I've actually distilled some after the stuff that you saw in this video.

[00:30:26]I've actually made collected about six lers, close to six quarts, um just in between other distillations and I've poured most of that into my vehicle, but I ran a little bit through the lawn mower just to clean out the bacon fat stuff so that we could test the engine oil. Anyway, all that to say, you're not going to be able to see this stuff being tested in this video. I've been extremely busy with work.

[00:30:52]Definitely not complaining. I consider myself quite fortunate that uh I have the job that I do and it gives me a little bit of freedom and uh well it pays the bills. Anyway, that is going to do it for this one. I'm going to share a bit of a clip with you guys. I had a bit of a week of struggles this week and I'm just going to show you guys one of those at the end of this video. That's going to do it for this one. Thanks for watching. I'll see you next time.

[00:31:29]Arriving at my first service call.

[00:31:45]It's just been one of those days where you think to yourself.

[00:31:50]Should I just give up?

[00:31:55]If only this were the worst of it.

[00:31:58]I've had this air compressor now for probably close to 10 years, and I've taken pretty good care of it. I run synthetic oil in it and change it out uh every couple of years. And I've actually tried to drain the tanks fairly regularly, but finally I sprung a leak in the bottom of one of these tanks. And that's partially a fault of the way they manufacture these. The valve for letting the water out for draining them isn't at the bottom of the tank. So, you're never going to get all of the water out.

[00:32:32]There's always going to be stuff sitting in there. Um, yeah. So, I went to price another air compressor.

[00:32:41]and figured, well, this one has lasted me this long. I'll just get another one.

[00:32:46]It was almost $800 to replace this stupid little compressor. So, I bought a tank off Amazon, and I'm going to make that tank fit onto this air compressor.

[00:32:59]Hey, Little Flo.

[00:33:02]Hi.

[00:33:04]What are you doing?

[00:33:22]you doing there? All right, folks. Took me all day, but I got the air compressor tank installed.

[00:33:31]I now have it. So, the switch is on the end and I can actually see the gauge and get to the switch if I ever need to.

[00:33:40]I've also shortened the wire up and cut a bad section out of it. It's plenty long now.

[00:33:47]And I had to relocate this thing. So, I added a piece of hose here. Seems to be working fine. As you guys can see, it is holding pressure and not leaking. So, that's good.

[00:34:02]take you in through here and show you.

[00:34:07]Yeah.

[00:34:08]Yeah.

[00:34:14]Yeah. So, on this side, I welded the leg that came on the tank to the frame of the original air compressor frame. And then on this side, I just welded a little chunk of metal in between. The tank is sitting perfectly on top of the frame. Let's see if I can show you that.

[00:34:34]Yeah, the tank sits on top of the frame.

[00:34:37]So, realistically, all the welding is doing is stopping it from rotating and stopping it from going back and forth.

[00:34:46]So, basically got three welds on it that will absolutely hold it in place. Uh, I was going to stand the tank straight up and down, but I didn't for a couple of reasons. One is because I wanted to use the original hard line. You see this is the copper line that comes out of the compressor and it goes down and it's bent and it goes over here and over there. And quite miraculously, this tank actually fit perfectly on there. So that uh that lined up when this leg was against the frame. So it made it really easy to make the decision on where to mount the tank or how to mount the tank. Uh I didn't have any plugs in quarter inch or I only had one plug in quarter inch. So, I used these valves off of the old tank, the drain valves, and they're sticking out. I might grab a saw and cut them off because my bins slide in. And my bins actually go right up against my compressor or my generator rather. So, this is actually sticking out um because of the taper of the bottom of the bin. I think I do have some clearance, but I don't want these digging, tearing up my bin. So, I think I'll cut these off cuz they'll never get used. With my luck, they're hollow inside and they'll start leaking as soon as I cut them. And then I'll have to go get plugs anyway. But, uh, yeah, I've got a drain on the bottom of the tank now that's actually on the very bottom of the tank.

[00:36:20]I've got the original original blowoff valve.

[00:36:24]Uh, and I had to get one more plug here, but yeah, went fairly well. It did take me quite a while, but uh yeah. Hey, what are you doing?

[00:36:44]What are you doing? Get out of here.

[00:36:47]Stop coming at me. Don't come at me, bro. Don't come at me, bro. Hey, get back.

[00:36:57]Get back.

[00:37:00]Those things are dangerous. I don't trust him.