Rusty bucket said:
I used Caswell in my Paul Smart tank after the first one went tits up and bowed and buckled. Its spread again somewhat but the finish is still intact and good. Acerbis made these tanks FRP I think its called Fiberglass reinforced plastic maybe? The stuff is total shite. Of Course its sad in the US we have plentiful resources for petrol and still can't get a good drop of fuel since MTBE has been banned in most states.
Couple of things:
In the old days, one could buy pump gas with 100+ octane rating. This was largely achieved by adding tetraethyl lead to gas. This lead additive was cheap, effective, and left deposits on the valve seats that helped cushion and seal the valves. It also dumped thousands of tons of lead into the environment, and we now know lead is bad for us. Lead also ruins catalytic converters by binding with the catalyst (usually platinum or palladium), so it had to go.
MTBE - Methyl tert-butyl ether, was used to replace lead. It also boosts octane, and though doesn't leave deposits on valve seats, increases the oxygen content of gasoline to help in more complete combustion. In the '90s, the US government required gas to have a 2% oxygen content. MTBE is also cheap - it provides a lot of bang for the buck.
By the late '90s, MTBE started showed up in groundwater and municipal water supplies. Turns out that MTBE is worse for people than lead. Besides, the big agra companies and farm lobby were pushing to replace MTBE with ethanol. Therefore, we replaced MTBE with 10% ethanol, and the agra lobby is pushing for E15.
Doesn't matter that our converting millions of bushels of corn into a fuel additive contributed to price spikes on staple grains throughout the world. It also doesn't matter that the US is no longer a net importer of fossil fuels. Ethanol in gas appears to be here to stay.
Goes to prove the old adage, "today's solution is tomorrow's problem"
BTW - plastic tanks found on Triumph, H-D, KTM, Aprilia, and a few others were also affected. The problem with Ducati was in the way the tank was mounted. Rather than be bolted down front and rear, the Ducatis slipped onto projections at the front and were bolted down at the rear. As the tank swelled, it 'pancaked' and would no longer engage with those tabs at the front. My Speed Triple tank also swelled a bit, but was fixed by an allen bolt and grommet at the front, so stayed in place. After to switching to ethanol-free gas, the tank slowly shrank back almost to original size.