I may be wrong but if I remember right year’s ago driving the original Rt 66 before the interstates from St Louis to California I think you could see every brand of gas sold it this country.
What’s the difference between Exxon and Mobil? Your post seems to imply that you found one. It seems to me they should be identical.
I assume they are probably the same except that there isn’t Exxon station within 200 miles of here so I can’t comment on that . I have used it when on long trips and it ran fine when you find it off one of the interstates .
There’s still a few Sinclair stations in this area; Dino and all. One dinosaur is welded down and the other was moved to the roof to keep thieves at bay.
Hard to believe there might be a market for fencing stolen green dinosaurs.
Could be just what’s available. They are one company, but they still operate different gas stations. We have plenty of Mobil stations in my area…Closest Exxon I know of is 20 miles away.
The gasoline I think is the worst you can put in your tank is “Drip Gas”. I spent a couple of years in Southern Illinois back in the early 1960s. There were some oil wells in the area. I was at a gas station when an old car rolled in knocking like a marble tournament. I said something to the attendant pumping the gas into my car about the car that had just driven in. The attendant said, “He runs his car on Drip Gas”. I found out that Drip Gas was obtained by putting a bucket under the flame of an oil well which burned off the slag. The condensation from the flame dripped into the bucket and it was burned like gasoline in an internal combustion engine. It may have been mixed with refined gasoline from a regular gas station, but I really don’t know. I’m cheap, but I wouldn’t even put Drip Gas in my old lawnmower engine.
On the other hand, we used to have an independent brand that had quite a few gas stations in my area. The service manager who was also the head mechanic at the DeSoto/Plymouth dealer that I liked to talk to recommended the gasoline from these independent stations. The gasoline was a couple of cents cheaper than the name brands. My mechanic friend said with the high volume of gasoline the independent sold, that particularly in the winter, a station that pumped a high volume of gasoline was less apt to have condensation in the underground tanks.
There’s one Sinclair station I know of in my area. They still offer full service and also keep busy with two mechanic bays for maintenance and repairs. They have very loyal customers.
As a girl our house was about a mile and a half to two miles from Sinclair’s big lab in Tulsa, OK. The ventilation system on that building was HUGE. We often could hear the big fans and periodically would hear a concusive boom from the ventilation. I’ve no clue what those concusive booms were.
By the time I was in high school the place had been converted into the Children’s Medical Center. Sometime in the 40 years since I last lived in Tulsa the building was torn down and the site rebuilt with a big box retail store.
Sinclair is like Gulf. At one point it was an oil company, merged into Atlantic Richfield in 1969, which became ARCO. The Sinclair name was then sold off.
Edit - actually, it was some of the ARCO gas stations that were sold off, in 1976. The gas stations between the Mississippi and the Rockies were spun off to Robert Holding.
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I remember different brands of gasoline advertised the additives in their gasolines. D-X contained Boron, Standard gasoline had M2PG, Shell’s premium fuel had Platfomate. Shell gasoline also had TCP as an additive. Our neighbor worked for Standard. He said that the TCP in the Shell gasoline stood for Tom Cat P*ss.
We have both Mobil and Exxon, more Exxon.
Remember Standard’s “Final Filter” and Purple Martin gasoline? IIRC there was some brand - Martin? - that let you dial through a large range of octanes to get the octane (or the price) you wanted.
I always liked Mobil’s maps best, so when I got my first credit card in the 1970s it was a Mobil card.
TCP is used in reciprocating aircraft engines. It helps prevent lead buildup on spark plugs. Yes, lead is still used in 100LL (“low-lead”) avgas.
+1
Marathon is–I believe–mostly a mid-West brand of gas, but because of cable TV, I see their ads with some frequency in NJ. As a long-time Marathon stockholder, I fear that they may not be spending their advertising dollars wisely.
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Do you recall Sinclair’s claim–in the '60s–that the addition of nickel to their gasoline led to less engine wear?
Here is a little walk down Memory Lane:
My chemist colleagues told me that TCP stood for tricresylphosphate. I have no idea what that is. When I took chemistry, there were only 4 elements: earth; air; fire; water. I remember making different isotopes of fire and water and analyzing these isotopes for the physical property of taste.
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Sunoco did that, and stopped it not long ago in Central Maryland, maybe 10 to 15 years.
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A kid I went to school with had a 65 Mustang and he stole some drip gas from an oil lease. That car was barely running and smoking like a grass fire the next day. Drip gas is somewhere around 40 to 50 octane.
He learned a lesson from that one.
I was a pump jockey at a Mobil station in 1966, Mobil was advertising a “Megatane” rating, just marketing hooey.
When I was 12, had a Sinclair blow up dinosaur beach toy.
Around the same era, our local Sears (or Wards) had a gas station that you could dial in the obtain you wanted.
We use to have Marathon here in NH and MA. Then Hess came in and bought out all the Marathon gas-stations. Then about 20 years later Speedway came in and bought out all the Hess gas stations. And Speedway is owned by Marathon.
The Speedway up from our house just got rebranded a few months ago as a Marathon station. I wonder if Marathon is eliminating the Speedway division