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distalate fuel

A

Anonymous-0

Well-known Member
what exactly was distalate tractor fuel? I take it was produced during ww2 be cause of gas rationing, ive seen farmall Hs and Ms with the small gas starting tank and shutters.i have seen john deeres with 2 tanks also.was it home brewed moonshine or was it like a kerosene?
 

Distillate was a very low grade of gasoline. I think it was pretty much the first thing that came out of the crude oil when the refining process was begun. Pretty dirty stuff and contained a lot of moisture. But it was cheap. It was being produced LONG before WW2.
 
It"s similar to kerosene and is a byproduct of petroleum. The engine needed to get really hot to burn/vaporize distillate so the tractor was started on gas then switched to distillate then back to gas before the engine was shut off so that gas was back in the lines for when you needed to start it again cold. The shutters were used on kero/distillate tractors to help with the warming process, those gas tanks were small so you wanted that engine hot quickly so you could switch over, the whole point of the distillate engine was to save money on gas. It was just cheaper during the wwII rationing days and was an option I believe through the Farmall 450. ~Anthony
 
Goes way back before WW2 was cheap fuel and old tractors didnt need gas to do their work as their engines were simple. Just look up the history about it.
 
The old caterpillars were like that, naturally aspirated non turbo, WWII era, I believe they used to "tout" the capability, diesel, and or various types of fuel oils, maybe not bunker oil, but apparently you did have some options if I recall.
 
I don't know if we're talking about the same thing, and I'm no expert on the subject, but down here in north Louisiana, where we have lots of natural gas wells, we refer to distillate as being the naturally-occuring petroleum component that is produced during the production of gas. It is more correctly a condensate rather than a distillate. It is not the product of a formal refining process. When I was a lad we called it "casing head", and some of my buds would go out to a well-site and somehow obtain the stuff to run in their old cars and trucks, usually with poor results.
 
Low octane and much cheaper than gas.

One ting you didn't do to save a but kickin was to forget to switch over to gas before shutting the engine off. Dad didn't like that at all!
 
I think most all of them were distillate engines until 1935 when Hart Parr/Oliver came out with the model 70. It had the 70 designation because it would run on 70 octane gasoline.
 
yes--my old R2 had 2 gas tanks--one for starting on gasoline and the main for basically a kerosene grade fuel--i tried kerosene once and it seemed ok but soon realized i had to switch back to gas before shutting it off to get the kero out of the fuel system for the next start!!
 
I've heard it called "drip fuel" or "tractor fuel" or "distillate" (related to todays Kerosene) but regardless its lower octane then gasoline and in order to keep it in the vapor state it required such things as a hot manifold and for the tractor to be brought up to operating temperature and ran on gas prior to switching over to the lower octane distillate fuel. On some older two cylinder Deeres, water injection was also used to prevent pre ignition or spark knock.

John T
 
Those two tank systems were for gasoline [small tank] and kereo. They were in use before WW2 as can be attested by the fact that very few new tractors were produced during the war and a lot of much older tractors have the dual fuel option. I have an farmall F14 and a F20 both made in the mid 1930's.
If you forgot to switch back to gas before you shut down your tractor it was not a big deal as those old tractor carbs had drains to remove the kerosene. I have done that when operating my JD model H and it was fixed in about a minute.
I believe some of you posters have either a bad memory or just make up your own stories as you go.
Some posters are correct on the distillates as they were just the poor quality fuel left when making gasoline and kerosene. It was used in older, low compression, engines but not much after the mid 1920's.
 
JohnT,
My dad had an old JD D what worked that way. Used water out of radiator. Had a small gas tank to start it, then switch it over to diesel. I put a lot of seat time on the old girl. Just wish it had a muffler and a taller exhaust pipe. The JD D was an old power house in it's day.

Did it freeze in Florida?
George
 
Isnt it funny....years ago it was basically a low grade fuel, like kerosene and didnt produce as much hp/hr as other fuels. But even it being a lower quality, it doesnt reflect the price of kerosene in the present...lol. Im sure the "clean" kerosene now is much better quality. It should be for the price of it.
 
I hauled what we called Power Fuel when I first started hauling fuel. I think I put 100 gallons of gas in 400 gal of No.1 fuel. Not Kerosene. K1 had the sulfur taken out. Some even had a little perfume, so it didn't smell up your house. Some customers wanted No 2 and gas mixed together. There wasn't any tax on gasoline when you mixed it with fuel oil. (Il.) A good friend of mine found out his tractor MM U would run on Parts washing Solvent. He got it used from the factory where he worked. He never had any spark plug trouble. Drip is different. It is more like gasoline only drier. A old man North of town had a 1000 gal tank buried in the flare line. He sold it to kids. I think 2.00 to fill your car. Might had been just a dollar. Didn't have a meter. It burn't fine in a 312 Ford. Some people put a little motor oil in with it, but I never did. His well made good drip and a lot of it. Motor never pinged. Vic
 
nybadlybentoutofshape,
You wrote "It was used in older engines but not much after the mid 1920s".

If my father, uncles and grandfather in Iowa knew that in the late 1940s and early 1950s they would have been shocked at being so fooled. They used distillate in their JD Bs, As & Gs and others used it in their F20s, Farmall Hs and Ms. They didn't know it wasn't used anymore! And I drove most of those tractors. Tank trucks delivered more distillate than gas to some farms in the mid-west in those days.
LA in WI
 
Oh, not? I was born in 1934 and clearly remember Dad taking 50 gallon drums to the city when he hauled butcher hogs to the packer. The drums were on top of the trailer and after the hogs got off, the barrels came down on the trailer bed and we were off to the distillate (tractor fuel) place for a fill of fuel at 5 cents or less to be burned in the '30 GP John Deere. See what inflation has helped do to us!
 
The way I heard it was, before WW2 refineries used a straight distillation process, you took what you got, hence distillate was one of the products. During WW2 to meet the demand for much more avgas and gasoline they developed the cracking process, so they could make what ever was in demand, and there were no more cheap by-products.
 
(quoted from post at 16:27:35 01/24/14) The way I heard it was, before WW2 refineries used a straight distillation process, you took what you got, hence distillate was one of the products. During WW2 to meet the demand for much more avgas and gasoline they developed the cracking process, so they could make what ever was in demand, and there were no more cheap by-products.
Click to expand...

Russ actually the "gas shortage in WWII" was a myth started by the government to get people to drive less. What we were short of was rubber. Most came from South East Asia and there was no way to get more. The government came up with the gas story and rationing as a way to keep people from wearing the rubber off of their cars.

Rick
 
When in grade school 1949 I went to 'John Deere Day" to get the hot dogs and other goodies. One thing I brought back with a picture and description of every piece of equipment. The book listed the "G" as being designed to burn the heavier fuels (distillate?) The advertised horsepower was slightly more than the "A". The first "G" I saw was in 1953.

In 1954 I worked on a farm that use POWER FUEL in a Farmall "M". The price of the fuel was about a nickel a gallon less and the "M" was cold natured. They also had a 1949 KB-2 truck and it was almost a gear weaker using the POWER FUEL. I ran it a lot in second.
 
(quoted from post at 15:06:18 01/24/14) Isnt it funny....years ago it was basically a low grade fuel, like kerosene and didnt produce as much hp/hr as other fuels. But even it being a lower quality, it doesnt reflect the price of kerosene in the present...lol. Im sure the "clean" kerosene now is much better quality. It should be for the price of it.
Click to expand...

The reduced hp/hr performance was due to using it in engines with reduced compression ratios, not because of the quality. If you used gasoline in an engine with 4:1 compression you would see a similar reduction in hp/hr performance.

It was the wrong fuel for a spark ignition engine and was used for the most part because it was cheap, very cheap.
 
Many Farmall Hs and Ms that were distilate(Kerosene) models no longer have their control rod and shutters. The reason is that when the farmers switched to running all their machines on gasoline the hired hands would forget to open the shutters and over heat the engines. The shutters were removed as a preventine measure. In the early 70's we would buy one 55 gal drum of tractor fuel to rake hay with an H. TF was about 23 cents a gallon, gas was 28 cents a gallon and we were paying 13 cents for diesel. We only ran the H when we needed a third tractor. By that time TF was close enough to gas that you could start on it and not close the shutters. I seem to remember old timers talking about using the two petcocks on the side of the Farmall oil pans. It seemed that when running the old style tractor fuel that there would be a liquid build up in the the engine and they would drain the crankcase down to the lower petcock and then refill with fresh oil to the upper petcock.
 
Per the Nebraska tractor test data for the Farmall H in 1939. The distillate fuel was 37 octane and the gasoline was 71 octane. The Horse power hour/gal was very comparable between the two, but the gasoline model did produce more horsepower.
 
Old, Don't forget...the speed limit was lowered to 35 mph to improve mileage on the cars. Lower speeds saved more gas than lower speeds saved on tire wear...but lower speeds saved everything on car wear and tear.
(I think I'm older than you, and I don't consider myself old! That's a state of mind I am not interested in).
LA in WI
 
LA actually the speed limit reduction to 35 was to make it faster to ride a train and discourage driving unless necessary. Sure it saved fuel but TX and LA were pumping oil like mad, new refineries were built and there was no fuel shortage. The shortage was rubber. We had oil and fuel, we had to import rubber. Keep people from driving and you save rubber. Some war production tractors were built with steel wheels to save rubber. We had oil but had to import rubber. Patton running out of fuel wasn't because there was no fuel. It was to give good old Monty the chance to make some head lines and give the Brits a moral boost. Patton was grabbing all the headlines with his "dash" across France. Monty had been nothing more than a side show sense the brake out from Normandy.

Rick
 
"Tractor-fuel was a low grade fuel produced between gasoline and diesel in the traditional distillation of crude oil. The refining techniques developed during World War II made it possible to convert this into more useful fuels, and it began to disappear."
Source
 
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