Technical question, re: chemistry/petrol

[House of Usher]

Thanks Slips and Art for the info. I feel quite reassured about the shelf-life of motor fuel in the event of the apocalypse. Can't say I'm all that confident of the condition of motor vehicles that one might find abandoned at the side of the road or parked up a year or two down the line, but at least if you had a car that worked when thw orld went down the toilet, it ought to keep going as long you can find petrol for it and you maintain it properly. I'll sleep more soundly now for that.

[House of Usher]

Spoiler.
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That's not even funny!

[Emperor]

You can remove impurities from petrol by filtering it through chamois leather.

My grandpa was both a champion trails rider (so was used to improvising with mechanics on the fly) and tight as a gnats chuff so when someone poured sugar into his petrol tank we spent a fun afternoon with a length of pipe, a funnel and some chamois leather (and not many young boys could say that without being taken into care soon after).

In a post-apocalyptic scenario diesel would be your stopgap solution while you started creating biodiesel. As scary as it sounds there is a big subcilture of books, courses and sites all teaching about permaculture, biodiesel and the like as people prepare for the coming troubles and tribulations especially as we pass Peak Oil (as one might expect it is awfully popular on the other side of the Pond).

http://www.biofuelssolutions.co.uk/
http://www.officialbiodiesel.com/products/book.htm

So what they should really be doing in TWD is planting up areas of oilseed rape and collecing animal fats (one wonders if zombie fats might work!!!) and working on getting a source of something like methanol for the transesterification process.

I'd have to check but I think TWD is still pretty much in the stage 1 part of the apocalypse. That stage is a harsh filter but you can see them moving on from just running to trying to establish a base which is stage 2. Either the farm or the prison would have been good for creating biodiesel (with minuses to the pluses - it also shows that you may have to move base a few times in stage 2). As has been shown you get a window of a year or two to move on to stage 3 which is having a well-reinforced, self-sustaining stronghold as even canned goods will start to go off by this point too.

[nofuture]

and Rick's hand is the hand found in the briefcase in Dredd, eh?!

[VisibleMan]

...and collecing animal fats (one wonders if zombie fats might work!!!)

Would giant badger-eating lamprey oil work?

[BrianO]

The more important question, is come the apocalypse, where would you be bothered moving all the cars that'll block the roads to?

[DavidXBrunt]

Spooky co-incidence of the month was the letter in that issue that mentions both UrbanDead and a Zombie book I got for 99p the day before buying that issue.