Um, no, Mazda. Mazda has recalled 65,000 Mazda6's because of concerns that spiders may have crawled into a fuel hose, Cheiracanthium inclusum, the whitish bitey kind we find dropping from the ceiling at midnight, the same kind that terrorized my daughter growing up. While there's some debate how they got in the cars--a bug expert believes they crawled into the hoses sitting in a Mazda warehouse--Mazda maintains it's "just a mystery."
For the less mechanically minded among us, spiders (or anything besides gasoline) sitting in a fuel line is not good.
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My sister had a Fiat Spider back when our gang had hair on our heads (and not on our ears). Her fuel line popped off once, and a small fire erupted. I didn't think to check for a spider, but I do remember being amazed at how much it looked like fog.There's a good reason for that--it is fog. If you burn a hydrocarbon cleanly (with enough oxygen available), you get CO2 and water. White smoke is just water. No one believes this, of course, even if we say we do. Our brains file it under the smoke category, and we get on with life.
2C8H18 + 25O2 -> 16CO2 + 18H20
Unless you teach science to sophomores.
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I have no idea what a yellow sac spider weighs--maybe a half gram at best? I do know that a 2009 Mazda6i Sport weighs about 3300 pounds empty. Over 100,000 tons of cars have been recalled, waylaid by a spider that already has a reputation for being a nuisance.
Maybe it's the Luddite in me, maybe I'm just getting too cranky seeing us destroy the bigger world around us, but seeing rockets get lost in the Pacific and spiders move mountains of metal have made the news fun again, gentle reminders of our hubris.
The gasoline combustion equation is a bit of a simplification since gasoline is made up of multiple kinds of hydrocarbons.
I showed octane, which makes up about a fifth of gasoline.
Apparently Mazda cars make the horizon tilt. Flipping through Mazda photos is like visiting the bad guys' lair in a Batman show.
Yellow sac spider photo from Local Pest Control Services
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4 comments:
This brief story was on NPR yesterday morning on our drive to school. My initial reaction was amusement, followed quickly be the frustrating attempt to explain this to my second grader. Your post explained a lot of things for me that I completely did not understand.
Dear Jenny,
It's a fun story, and one 2nd graders can get. Glad i helped.
THE SPIDER RECALL YOU ARE REFERRING TO IS NOT IN THE FUEL LINE, THAT WOULD BE ABSURD. THE DEBRIES IN THIS CASE A SPIDER WOULD BE CAUGHT IN THE FILTER OR BY THE SCREEN ON THE INJECTOR AND WOULD NOT CAUSE ANY ISSUE OTHER THAN A POSSIBLE MISFIRE. THE SPIDER IN QUESTION WOULD BE IN THE EVAPORATIVE CANISTER VENT LINE. THE PROBLEM IT CAN CAUSE IS A NEGATIVE PRESSURE IN THE FUEL TANK DUE TO A BLOCKED VENT LINE CAUSING DAMAGE TO THE TANK. FUEL TANKS AND FUEL EXPANDS AND CONTRACTS MAKING THE NEED FOR A VENT.
Dear Anonymous,
Your anonymity and your CAPS preference make me think twice about responding, but here it goes anyway.
I did not initiate the recall, Mazda did, for the reasons they stated. The story about my future sister-in-law's car was about a popped off fuel line. I have no idea why it popped off, but an object stuck in the line could certainly increase the pressure to whatever head the fuel pump can produce.
At any rate, a spider in any line falls in the absurd category.
It's just a blog.
Really....
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