pinging when i accellerate, does not do when im in park,does not do when im cruising 10-30-50or 70 etc...., only when igive it some to heavy accellration., car will not do it when its on a lift only while you are driving, any ideas why, car sat all winter, when i got it out this is first time i have had any problem.

 

If you didn't use a gas stabilizer, the gas is probably weak in octane. If it still does it after a fresh tank of gas, then you may need to decarb the motor. If it still does it, then you may want to do a scan.

 

but would it still do this in park, if this was the problem, only happens while driving exaust is only 2 years old ,magnaflow

 

There is no load on the motor in park.

 

A lot of people - including me - area experiencing ping because of the refomulated gas.

Thank the tree huggers.

 

from inside car it sounds like its coming from middle of console car is an automatic. could the driveshaft be hittng something, only does it while driving under accelleration

 

crappy gas.

what did you put in it?

 

it won't ping on the lift cause there is no load,did it just start doing it?if not then you might need a heavy dose of gm top cleaner to get rid of the carbon deposits.

 

bad gas

 

Some Idiot was here doing battle with me yesterday and said you can use 87 octane... it is fine, he is a petroleum engineer... I found out he was some guy working an oil drilling rig...
These idiots come here telling people like this guy who obviously knows nothing about cars, or ping, or how it occurs....
Ping is a condition cause by a load to the engine where the octane can not support the timing... and pre-ignite under load before it should this cause the engine to fire before the top of the power stroke thus causing engine ping. Left alone this could cause wrist pin damage, connecting rod bearing damage and Long term could blow a hole in the top of a piston... Ls/x engines have knock sensors which help to protect the engine, but each time the timing returns to advanced state and then you apply a load it pings.. the knock sensors detect this and retard the timing, which reduces power and gas economy... but the engine still pings everytime you apply a load until the knock sensors compensate..
My point here is there are alot of morons here with really bad information... many wanna be heroes etc... Be careful who you listen too..
The originator of this post should go and put the highest octane in his car that he can fine.. then all should be fine... if all you can find is 91 octane , you may need to do a decarb procedure... if you can find 93 octane and the ping is gone you will be ok..... if it pings at 93 octane you may need to decarb... contact me if you need any help I can walk you through it.
Bill aka ET

 

Hey Bill, your protagonist is a Director of Health, Environment, and Safety. Sounds well qualified to discuss automotive mechanical functioning to me.

 

How long did it take you to come up with this preaching ?

I do not know what the so called "idiot" posted but even GM says lower octane can be used if need be. All other cars and trucks with LS1,2, and 6 do not even state high octane is required.

Real question is why would someone want to use lower grade gas.

The PCM is fully able to tell if there is a fueling or ping issue and react to it, it can pull as much as 15 degrees of timing due to ping and it can switch to the low octance timing table so yes you can run with lower octane such as the 2006 Z06 with 100 more horsepower yet still uses the lower 91 octane gas.
Would most do it no but with the price of higher octane today more and more are using mid grade knowing the PCM will adjust and the performance could be lower or the higher car is too sealevel the less octane is needs.

Octane does not fix ping issues it can mask it. If owner does not maintain engine carbon buildup occurs and the thicker it is the more octane is needed to overcome the ping from the real problem of carbon buildup so simply de-carbing engine would require less octane.

Getting to a real answer then yours, if gas sat most of winter then delute with newer gas or suck it out and replace with new gas.
Being each gas maker uses different cleaning agents its good to switch brands since then different agents would be used and do a better overall cleaning. Put some gas/injector cleaner in tank, could be a fouled injector.
Have someone put a PCM scanner on and see if something else is the cause such as lazy O2, some type of intake or exhaust leak

Using mid grade once in a while is good since higher octane has less cleaning agents.

Some morons think the world will end if the wrong gas is used but in the end before knock sensors came about cars for 80 years ran fine and the engines did not fall out

 

Ill say this for you, As the only resident Gm engineer on this forum, I spent seven years developing this car before retiring in 2001...Everyone in the Corvette forum administration knows exactly who I am and my credentials...and by your post you know very little about automotive technology in the new millennium, especially your understanding of ping..... Octane masks ping????? Octane allows the compression of the fuel mixture to compress at a greater level.. it's an additive to keep the fuel in an non explosive state prior to ignition. This so called ,every other car, has 10.6 : 1 compression... it produces more than `1 hp per cubic inch, there is no higher compression engine built for any American passenger car. All Petroleum manufactures offer at least two grades of fuel.. One is always a premium packaged fuel.. 91 or 93 octane...
If this is the highest compression engine on the market and it can use regular, what is all the premium fuel for???
The new LS7 has 10.9:1 compression..
Anyone in California where you can only get 91 octane sees ping on a 95 + day...and those that even know what ping is, are using torco or some other octane booster..
I'm not preaching
I have 45 year of automotive technology under my belt, 2 Bachelor of Science degrees from Georgia Tech, Rowan University and post grad at the Drexel school of engineering.
the last 15 I spent with GM and the last seven of those with the C5....
Gm states you can use regular fuel in the car... what that mean is in an emergency or to get you home.. the recommended fuel is premium...
If the car ran exclusively on regular and produced 350/405 hp and ran on regular is would be widely advertised/// which it isn't..because it isn't and wasn't designed to run on regular fuel..but you are right, it can...but at what cost...knock sensor retard the timing, reduce engine performance and decrease fuel economy, but you can run regular...
Should you use regular?? Hell No... if you can't afford the right fuel for the car you should sell it..

 

I would agree... Why have a vette if you are going to put anything less than premium in it in the first place?

 

TORCO ....... No Ping ...... EVER !!


DH

 

I agree. If you have 87 octane fuel and compress it quickly it will self detonate. Octane does not increase power or fuel mileage. This may be a perceived benefit because the high comptression engine simply runs better. The octane rating of gasoline tells you how much the fuel can be compressed before it spontaneously ignites. When gas ignites by compression rather than because of the spark from the spark plug, it causes knocking in the engine. Knocking can damage an engine, so it is not something you want to have happening. Lower-octane gas (like "regular" 87-octane gasoline) can handle the least amount of compression before igniting.

The compression ratio of your engine determines the octane rating of the gas you must use in the car. One way to increase the horsepower of an engine of a given displacement is to increase its compression ratio. So a "high-performance engine" has a higher compression ratio and requires higher-octane fuel. The advantage of a high compression ratio is that it gives your engine a higher horsepower rating for a given engine weight -- that is what makes the engine "high performance." The disadvantage is that the gasoline for your engine costs more.

The name "octane" comes from the following fact: When you take crude oil and "crack" it in a refinery, you end up getting hydrocarbon chains of different lengths. These different chain lengths can then be separated from each other and blended to form different fuels. For example, you may have heard of methane, propane and butane. All three of them are hydrocarbons. Methane has just a single carbon atom. Propane has three carbon atoms chained together. Butane has four carbon atoms chained together. Pentane has five, hexane has six, heptane has seven and octane has eight carbons chained together.

It turns out that heptane handles compression very poorly. Compress it just a little and it ignites spontaneously. Octane handles compression very well -- you can compress it a lot and nothing happens. Eighty-seven-octane gasoline is gasoline that contains 87-percent octane and 13-percent heptane (or some other combination of fuels that has the same performance of the 87/13 combination of octane/heptane). It spontaneously ignites at a given compression level, and can only be used in engines that do not exceed that compression ratio.

During WWI, it was discovered that you can add a chemical called tetraethyl lead (TEL) to gasoline and significantly improve its octane rating above the octane/heptane combination. Cheaper grades of gasoline could be made usable by adding TEL. This led to the widespread use of "ethyl" or "leaded" gasoline. Unfortunately, the side effects of adding lead to gasoline are:

Lead clogs a catalytic converter and renders it inoperable within minutes.
The Earth became covered in a thin layer of lead, and lead is toxic to many living things (including humans).
When lead was banned, gasoline got more expensive because refineries could not boost the octane ratings of cheaper grades any more. Airplanes are still allowed to use leaded gasoline (known as AvGas), and octane ratings of 100 or more are commonly used in super-high-performance piston airplane engines. In the case of AvGas, 100 is the gasoline's performance rating, not the percentage of actual octane in the gas. The addition of TEL boosts the compression level of the gasoline -- it doesn't add more octane.

 

Nice post, One more fact, fresh gas is best, I use 91 but I buy at a
high volume station. which could be better than 93 that is sits longer.

 

The gen3 trucks have a different timing curve than the LS cars, and are designed to run 87 as stock. The LS car can and does learn knock behavior, but I have found that, if a constant 2-3* is recurring, you will still hear it, and that seems to be more of a chronic case from all of the newby tuners leaning on the edge,and sometimes, just plain keeping them in knock retard. The low octane tables are intended as a limp home mode, the high octane tables are for premium, and one should use it, as it is recommended from the manufacturer. It is my opinion that a Vette owner should do so, and should have budgeted for premium fuel when considering the purchase in the first place. A little more for fuel is worth it to me.

Bottom line, use some good 93, if you can get it, and clean the carbon. I use BG44k with good success, but there are other options, as well. I will also tell you that GM did have some detonation issues with their stock ignition curve programming, and it stems from some, but not all of the cars developing carbon buildup. This is the same problem that brings people believe that they need "retunes" every so often. Tuning under unrealistic conditions, and delivering a car tuned to the edge of detonation to begin with causes this.

 

Sounds like the gas.

 

Ok, I'm not expert, but wouldn't poor gas cause knock or detonation?

I've always separated ping from knock/detonation in my mind. I would expect ping to be more related to carbon or hot-spots causing very localized explosion but not early detonation/knock which would be caused by poor gas.

Wouldn't lower octane (thereby not supporting higher compression) cause more of a generalized knock due to a more macroscopic detonation/early ignition in the cyllinder?

Again, no expert, didn't stay in a Holiday Inn Express last night either