>The obvious thing that you are missing is that you often
>give an uncomfortable static discharge to your car.
My '88 Medallion would zap me any time of the year.
I sprayed all the cloth on the seats and doors with
that anti-cling laundry spray, used 3/4 of the can, and
it was 9 or 10 months before it happened again. Then I
just used the rest of the can on the drivers seat.
>Unless your car has a plastic body (hands up
>anyone on the list with a quad-wheel Europa?)
>anything that you touch on it will
>most likely already be grounded.
Guilty as charged. I took out the system from
the fuel cap to the U-joints and there is no direct
connection between the cap/filler neck - tank - fuel
pump. Those two previous "-" represent rubber or
plastic parts (yes, plastic fuel lines, I liked the clear
pressure line best, you could see what was going on).
However, it never zapped me, even at -20deg F
(650CCA batteries are great up north).
>Might not work always. On a newly painted and/or
>freshly-waxed, ya gets only water beads. Sounds
>dubious anyway, as static also arrives in the fuel
>itself, if running through a nonconductive filler
>hose.
The point here is to round up all errant charges and neutralize them.
Beading or wetting doesn't matter as the rag has collected them.
My suggestion is to ground anything (and everything, not enough
could be worse than none at all) you are concerned about with
a 1Meg resistor at the end you would like to protect (such as the
filler neck, this will reduce the size of the spark which would be
larger due to the capacitance of the ground cable if the resistor were
at the far end). To use, touch the two parts together for 6 seconds
before going to the next step. This comes from my 30 years in the
electronic field including nukes and rocket motors. What would I
do? Just touch both items with bare hands first, then introduce them.
Dave
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