Who to Believe ?
harrym,
I would have thought that the best course would have been to take the petrol coupons and the mileage allowance. As late as '54 we were paying our Auxiliaries 4.25p/mile for coming in for training with their cars, and the same to one bright spark who had a PPL (or was it still an "A" Licence?) and occasionally flew in with a Gypsy Moth from Greatham to Thornaby; don't remember what a m/bike would get. And then use your methanol for the trip to get the best of both worlds!
Ronsonol would have been far too expensive to use in any quantity, although, as I have related in a Post long ago, it was a vital factor in firing-up my old ('31) Standard Big Nine from dead cold, but of course I only needed a little (say 25ml) to fill the tiny float chamber for each cold start.
Smudge,
I cannot understand the relatively recent PlumbPhobia which has sprung up. From the days of the Romans, we have drunk from lead cisterns, aquaducts and through lead pipes, and through all the following centuries until almost the present day. Infants sucked on their lead soldiers for generations and no one came to any harm, as far as I could see.
Many old soldiers lived out to a good old age in spite of having musket balls lodged in them somewhere where it was too dangerous for the surgeon to try to remove them. In our households, we drank our morning tea from water (sometimes acidic, as it is in this area) that had remained stationary in the lead pipes all night.
The consensus of medical opinion now is, that Tetra Ethyl Lead is injurious to humans, although it has a beneficial effect in internal combustion engines (and of course it is death to exhaust catalysts). All I can say is, that my generation lived (from the '20s through to the '90s), through the age of an enormous increase of road traffic (and a highly motorised war in ground and air), during which leaded fuels were the norm, and the expectation of life has increased considerably over the same period (I myself am a case in point).
That the use of leaded petrol has added to the existing risks from the water supply and other sources may be incontrovertible, but only to a very limited extent, IMHO.
Cheers, both, Danny.