Originally Posted by
Pantah
More to that point, stove fuel vapor is explosive. Not something you want to be cleaning parts with.
No, it is not explosive. Think of the way your start a liquid fuel stove. You pour out a little bit of the fuel into a cup, set the puddle on fire, and wait for it to warm up the feed tube so that is sprays out hot fuel which you than ignite. Not explosive at all.
Originally Posted by
HillRider
That's correct. Camp stove fuel (Coleman, Crown, etc.) are basically gasoline without the additives and just as dangerously flammable. OMS and Kerosine are both safer and just as effective as degreasers.
Absolutely not. Gasoline is a complex mixture of hydrocarbons with a significant percentage of benzene/xylene/toluene. It has a flash point of -40°F which means it will ignite at nearly any condition humans might encounter.
Stove fuel (aka “white gas”) is not gasoline. It is naphtha which has fewer branched hydrocarbons and a much higher flash point (0°F). It’s more flammable than mineral spirits (typical flash point of 50° to 100°F) but not nearly as flammable as gasoline. It’s much more closely related to kerosene than to gasoline.
The problem is with the “white gas” name. It is not gasoline and if you tried to run it in a gasoline engine…well, don’t. The control module in a modern engine would have a melt down trying to adjust for the knocks and pings you’d experience and would likely blow a rod through the block. Gasoline engines don’t like straight hydrocarbons.
Diesel has an even higher flash point, around 150F.
And diesel doesn’t evaporate, at least not completely. It leaves behind an oil film. You can use mineral spirits to clean disc rotors but don’t do that with diesel fuel.