Nanny State Gas Can Reprise

On August 31,  2011, I wrote about the idiocy of the nanny state and their gas can regulations.  Well, I can safely say that things haven't improved, but have gotten worse, very unsafe, more expensive, and environmentally bad.

To start out, I needed an additional one-gallon saw gas dispenser because I kept running out when working the saws and lawn equipment.  Anybody who used 2- and 4- stroke powered equipment knows that gasoline containers larger than one gallon are unwieldly and dangerous.  So with great hope in my heart that the government morons and crony capitalists haven't degraded the product I needed, I went to Atwoods to buy another container.

Much to my unsurprise, the only containers they had were now $14 as opposed to the $5 containers I bought a few years ago.  I thought I was getting the same container, because the spout was inverted into the container where I couldn't see it.  It is intuitively obvious that the proper spout needs to be flexible to fit into the small gas tank opening to  the rear of the support handle.  It needs to be flexible because a straight, stiff handle is useless when starting and stopping the gasoline flow.   Again, much to my unsurprise, the inverted spout stood straight up like stiff erection when properly mounted.  It was not even angled in the middle to provide a safe dispensing into any gasoline tank, let alone, the configuration on a chainsaw.

Of course, this spout had all the mandatory stupid safety features, like a stud that you push against the side of the gas feed hole, concurrently with an arthritic squeeze on the black saw-toothed safety lever , to start the gas flowing.  Unfortunately, this arrangement causes the gasoline to shoot across the hole into the environment.  It is even worse, when the tank is filled, the gasoline cannot be shut off with the black saw-toothed safety lever until the tip of the spout is removed from the lip of the gasoline filler hole, ensuring not only additional gasoline is spilled, but that all the remaining gasoline in the spout shoots out into the environment.

Anybody that reads this blog,  all seven of you, know that I am an engineer, and I think a good one at that.  I think that the engineer that (notice, I didn't say who) designed this and the federal bureaucrat that forced the engineer to design this abortion, should be disbarred, defrocked, castrated, and hung from the nearest lamp post.   Of course the ignorant bitch that has just taken over the EPA doesn't want any climate change deniers in her department, so she is probably too stupid to correct this situation.

To make an environmentally safe gas can, we are dumping at least 100 times more gasoline into the environment than we would using the old fashioned flexible spout can.