Barry Coleman bcoleman@riders.org and Mike Gatton rfh@africaonline.co.zw
Sent: Thursday, February 15,
2001 10:37 AM
All the fuel for all the
vehicles we manage in Africa is contaminated or adulterated. In particular we
are having a serious problem in DRC (Congo, Kinshasa) with water in diesel.
All our vehicles (not
motorcycles, unfortunately) are fitted with what we call superfilters. These
filters are very, very tightly-wound paper filters that take out massive
amounts of contaminants out of both the engine oil. And the fuel. The oil
filters are fitted outside the engine (sometimes more Than a meter away, which
helps cool the oil) and we change the elements every
10,000 kilometers or so. So
fabulous is the filtration that we very rarely change the oil (though we do
sample it regularly). Nothing wrong with that.
The fuel filters are another
matter. Good as they are, there is so much water in the diesel that it gets
through anyway.
What we need is a simple,
non-motorized, light, foolproof, cheap, easily distributed device for taking
the water out of the fuel before it is put in, or maybe while it's going in. I
have talked with Mike briefly about this And his first thought was some sort of
gravity-driven device using filters similar to our fuel superfilters. But of
course there may be a much better way.
It's certainly a real
problem and it's certainly pressing. Failure to sort it out might mean parking
trucks and interrupting the polio surveillance work on which they are engaged.