How to avoid blowing yourself up around your car

Countermeasures for 10 ways people commonly blow themselves up, and wake up in the burns unit. Here’s how to not become a fireball...

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You don’t have to join this club, especially now, with the hospitals awash in absenteeism and dripping with COVID.

I’ll also explain how you can avoid unwittingly poisoning yourself - with the same chemical used to kill 85,000 people during World War 1.

Self-poisoning is so easy to do, but even easier to avoid. But you have to know how. Di-chloro-carbon-monoxide - that’s gotta be evil stuff, right? Just the name sounds bad, because it is bad. 

Thousands of people have the precursor chemical in pressure packs, in their very own garages, today. And they don’t know. I’m not fearmongering - I’m trying to, potentially, save your life. 

Here goes: let’s prevent home-grown HAZMAT mayhem.

TIP #1 - Mixing chemicals 

When mixing chemicals with water, like in a bucket, always add the H2O first, because it’s an excellent thermal shock absorber.

What that means is, 5 litres of water at 20 degree Celcius offers a 1700 kiloJoule thermal shock absorber - it can tolerate a huge amount of thermal energy when you add various chemicals to it which might react in contact with two-part hydrogen and one-part oxygen.

If you add a large amount of water to a bucket with only a small amount of chemical in it, that fluid is unlike to contain the same thermal shock absorption characteristics of water and, instead of blending, it can suddenly become a searing ball of hot, corrosive steam which erupts into your face, burning you, damaging your vision and even getting into your lungs if you inhale, causing potentially fatal internal injuries.

Fall off a ladder at 4.2m up, you’ll generate about 3.3kJ - about the same amount of energy as a ute or full-size SUV travelling at 50km/h. Do you want to hit your head into the ground, or should you use a helmet to absorb the impact energy of such a fall?

I have a special report on why falling off a ladder is potentially deadly here >>

TIP #2 - Static refuelling

The easiest way to blow yourself up when refuelling your vehicle is with static electricity. See, when you open the fuel filler, you earth yourself to the car. And then you grab the pump, earthing yourself to it. So now, you, and the pump, and the car, are all at the same electrical potential. No sparking it up is possible.

But if anyone jumps out of the car like the wife, kids, maybe the nosey in-laws, that could be the last time you do anything. This is also why children should stay in the car during refuelling.

Phones are not intrinsically dangerous while refuelling - there’s never been a case of a fire at a fuel station caused by a phone. But it’s a really good idea to pay attention to re-fuelling when you’re actually engaged in this process, given the inherent potential for mayhem. So, that vital tweet can wait.

Also, portable fuel containers, like jerry cans and the smaller ones for yard equipment, have to come out of the vehicle, out of the tray of the ute. Put them on the ground next to the pump. This earths them, and therefore stops you discharging a static spark into them when you introduce the nozzle.

Importantly, get a visual lock on the emergency shut-off and fire extinguishers hidden in plain sight at every servo, just in case.

Car on fire? Here’s what to do >>

TIP #3 - Remote refuelling

Always open jerry cans slowly, because if the day has heated up, they’ll be under pressure, and it’s not air escaping, it’s highly flammable vapour. Have a fire extinguisher and a fire blanket ready. Don’t smoke.

If you have a fire in the middle of the Australian desert, and somehow it doesn’t hurt you or anybody else (thankfully), miraculously, what if it burns the vehicle to the ground?

You’ve just lost your mobility, comms, shelter, water, and first aid. You’re standing in the middle of the desert, and it’s 45 degrees C. There’s no shade for 100 kays. And you’re thirsty. Good luck with that.

You’d really want to have that fire extinguisher on standby. It’s not overkill. Also a good idea to have a ‘go bag’ of emergency supplies - sat-phone, water, shelter, first aid, sitting there, deployable, with absolute first-order accessibility. You need to be able to grab it and go, under extreme pressure.

Diesel is, of course, much safer than petrol in these situations. And you don’t need to re-fuel remotely quite as often in a diesel, in any case.

If you wanna know how long you can store said fuel in Jerry cans, click here >>

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TIP #4 - Overfilling Jerry cans

Don’t overfill jerry cans because they’re designed, like the fuel tank in your car, to have a small reserve of space to allow for temperature expansion. If you overfill the can, as the fuel expands with an increase in ambient temperature, it will pressurise the fuel and cause it to spray everywhere, possibly into your eyes, you could inhale vapour, and if there are any sparks or nearby sources of ignition - bad news. 

Also, try to store Jerry cans outside the vehicle, and make sure they’re safely restrained.

Don’t use frayed, stretched of twisted straps, or buckles that are cracked or don’t sufficiently keep the strap under tension. Same goes for ropes: split, stretch, frayed or deteriorated ropes are compromised.

TIP #5 - Gas bottle stowage

Gas bottles are a hugely popular source of portable energy out there, especially on the roads - strapped to 4WDs, caravans, packed into trailers. It’s really important to make sure they are not just idly stowed - they require proper restraining.

If you want to understand LPG in-depth report here >>

Don’t lie gas bottles down, or let them fall over. Build a clamp - each M10 Class 8.8 set screw tightened to about 40Nm will give you about two tonnes of clamping force - Learn about hi-tensile bolts here >>. It won’t be going anywhere.

TIP #6 - Backyard machines

How easily yard machinery can kill you.

Internal combustion yard equipment has more than enough fuel on board to kill you - brushcutters and mowers and chainsaws and shredders.

Instead of welding some random piece of bodywork or metal, for example, try unbolting the flare or guard or strut or perhaps remove the fuel tank itself if that’s easier. Rather than welding or grinding or filing - any situation where sparks might occur - remove the part and work on it away from the fuel source or fuel lines.

If you have to repair something, analyse the situation and look for potential dangers, and mitigate them.

TIP #7 - DIY vehicle modification

In the same way that yard machinery can literally blow up in your face, so can your car - especially your project car.

You might be at risk here, but so could your kid, if he’s a young bloke tinkering on his first or second shitbox, or something. Cutting out a chunk of rusty floor pan and welding in a patch, is a classic way to burn the house down. Even just fitting a big sub-woofer, drilling holes in the floor, soldering speaker wire, grinding rust. Whatever.

See, cars have fuel and electricity everywhere, and they’re built of highly flammable stuff, and of course, there’s plenty of oxygen to go around. All the magic ingredients. 

Have a look under the car to establish the prevailing risks - before you cut anything. Literally identify the terrain from below. Take photos with your phone if there are hard to reach places, use an (Olight) torch if needs be, to identify any possible risks underneath.

Avoid drilling, grinding and cutting if it involves proximity to the fuel tank. Also, fuel lines and electrical wires. Brake lines are another good thing not to damage by accident.

And while it is fun making sparks fly, it is a whole lot less dangerous cutting sheetmetal with a nibbler.

They just attach to a cordless drill, they don’t make sparks, and they cut up to 14 gauge, which is about 2.0mm. And they’re pretty cheap. Reciprocating saws and jigsaws do a pretty good job as well - just make sure you fit a fine-tooth bi-metal cutting blade. Don’t run the saw flat out, and cut fairly gently.

Also, it’s a good idea to get a welding blanket to stop the interior catching fire if you are grinding and making sparks, and certainly for when you start to weld the patch in. 

And if you’re using a grinder to clean up the edges to prep for welding, or something, use a wire wheel as opposed to an abrasive disc. Fewer sparks. Same precautions apply to any fab work in the engine bay, obviously. Welding blanket, not optional.

Lastly, wear eye protection for goodness sake - any time you’re cutting, filing, grinding, planing or hammering.

TIP #8 - Degreasing is dangerous

Don’t degrease with petrol. Petrol is actually an awesome degreaser; it’s just so damn dangerous to sit there, with your face stuck in a cloud of highly flammable vapour evaporating from a plastic container full of filthy parts.

Petrol’s also dangerous to breathe and/or get on your skin. So, use a proper degreaser carefully designed not to burst into flame at the mere suggestion of a spark.

Half a litre of petrol is more than enough to kill you if your face is above it when any fiery mayhem kicks off.

This also goes for fuel and engine additives, which of course don’t work.

TIP #9 - Locating safety gear

Systematically separate the hazmat in any workspace from the cutting operations. In industry you have this done for you, but in your garage it’s your job.

Paint, fuels, aerosols, LPG, Jerry cans, containers with two-stroke - whatever - move it awak from the cutting, grinding, potential sparks.

TIP #10 - Invest in emergency equipment

Have a fire extinguisher and a blanket (promo my video on that). ABE is the most general purpose fire extinguisher type you can get, and obviously, the bigger the extinguisher, the less likely you are to run out of oxygen-depriving powder in the heat of an actual emergency.

A fire blanket is another quick-deploy option which can rob a fire of oxygen and which is light enough for the kids or your smaller half to throw over you or your garage fire.

If you have a garage beer fridge, stick an ice pack in the freezer to quickly treat burns, ditto burn gel is another good idea to have handy.

Have a specific, easy-to-reach first aid kit which everybody in the house knows how to locate.

Invest in yourself by taking some kind of basic first aid course, learn CPR, how to treat cuts, wounds and sprains. Who knows, you might even save someone else.

AVOID ACCIDENTALLY GASSING YOURSELF

PHOSGENE

And finally, the deadly danger in brake cleaner. Well, some brake cleaner, anyway. There’s two kinds of brake cleaner, and the one to avoid is the chlorinated kind. These contain chemicals called ‘organochlorines’. Chloro-ethylene, basically.

If you need brake cleaner, look for one that is chlorine-free. It’s still properly awful stuff - containing toluene, etc - it’s just less awful.

In the chlorinated ones, the main culprit is tetra-chloro-ethylene, mainly, which the Americans call perchloro-ethylene, or just ‘perc’. These organichlorides are kick-arse cleaners and degreasers, but they’re just generally bad for you. Contact with your skin; breathing the vapours. It’s taking your DNA to GitMo and demanding Osama bin Laden’s home address, essentially. But it gets even more entertaining, potentially.

In your Fat Cave, the big danger is using this shit for welding prep. See, for a lot of welding processes, mainly GMAW and GTAW - Gas Metal Arc Welding and Gas Tungsten Arc Welding - more commonly called MIG and TIG, cleanliness is kinda important if you want a good result. Especially with TIG.

And that generally means degreasing before welding, especially if you’ve done a bunch of drilling and cutting ops with cutting lube. See, chlorinated brake cleaner leaves an organochloride residue on the parts. 

That’s bad, because once it hits a critical temperature, which I think is only about 300 degrees C, it decomposes into Phosgene gas, which is essentially chlorinated carbon monoxide. This especially evil compound is listed on Schedule 3 of the Chemical Weapons Convention, but it also has industrial uses - such as making polyurethane and polycarbonate, things of that nature.

And 300 degrees is easily exceeded in welding. So there’s you, sitting with your head in a cloud of smoke and phosgene. Well done. Two fairly insidious things about that:

One: Phosgene is not as dangerous as something like Sarin, obviously, but you can’t ‘accidentally’ make sarin, thankfully, but Phosgene is very dangerous in concentrations lower than you can smell it. So you won’t know if you are poisoning yourself. 

By all accounts it smells pretty nice - like cut grass. Go figure. 

Two: you don’t develop symptoms until much later, and by the time you have symptoms, it’s essentially too late to treat you. The treatment then is, essentially, put you in a room and see if you croak. So that’s the mother-lode of bad outcomes, right there. And you were just hoping to have fun welding.

My strong advice is that if you have any chlorinated brake cleaner in the shop, dispose of it responsibly, this week, at a proper chemical disposal facility. Don’t just put it in the garbage. And only ever use methylated spirits or or isopropyl alcohol, or acetone to degrease when you prep for welding.

So much safer, no residue, and certainly no phosgene. Just remember to put these safer chemicals away with the other HAZMAT stuff, before you spark any of the fun toys up.

Maybe weld in the open air to manage the fumes, or run a fan to blow them away from you. (That’s no good for MIG or TIG - it blows the shielding gas away, but it is viable for MMA or FCAW - stick welding and flux-cored MIG.) For gas-shielded processes, you need to run suction-type fume extraction. And in any case, lift your head up, out of the fumes.

This phosgene thing is a serious risk that a lot of backyard DIY warriors simply do not know about. But thankfully, now, you’re not among them.

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