Plastic Tank problems: Discussion thread, see info thread sticky for updates

The fairness hearing in the Settlement is tomorrow. I have no idea what the judge is going to do -- his history would suggest he likes settlements a lot.

I cannot say what effect the objections will have. There were a paltry number and Girard Gibbs made a point of that in their response to the objections, specifically pointing out that I have over 400 people signed up the Yahoo group, but "only" got 15 people to send in their objections. It's a valid point. If you can't get off your ass to send in a pre-filled out form to me....

In their response to me, they got completely wrong several points, which I now wish I could have arranged to be there to correct.

1. I did not claim that ethanol is not involved in the problem. I correctly pointed out that ethanol ALONE is not the problem. Water is the problem, ethanol exacerbates this because it is hydrophilic. I also correctly pointed out that the various manufacturers of PA6 Nylon claim that it is impervious to alcohols.

2. They claim that one of the exhibits I attached (the Minnesota E20 study) supports that ethanol does cause expansion. I pointed out that the study used a testing standard with a 50% ambient humidity requirement. Perhaps I should have made that clearer, but the point was that the test did NOT look at inducing problems with PA6 Nylon with ethanol ALONE. Also, in the study, they used a hypothetical "test mixture" of gasoline (E10/E20) with 1% volume of water added to simulate pump gasoline. Moreover, EVERY SINGLE MANUFACTURER of PA6 (BASF for instance) report that PA6 absorbs up to 10% by volume of water but report negligible absorption of alcohols including ethanol. The longer the polymer, the less absorption -- Nylon 12 absorbs far less than Nylon 6.

3. I stated, and provided an exhibit, that vendors sell PA6/Nylon specific epoxy formulations which are a) designed to fully adhere to all polyamides (i.e. Nylon, teflon, etc) and b) are fully resistant to fuel, alcohols and water. They proffered the prior statement by a witness (not publicly available) that epoxy coatings would not work and refer to an unsourced comment by someone at 3M that their epoxy coating products may not be appropriate for nylons. That misses the point and ignores the evidence. There are dozens of formulations of epoxy and there are at least a handful that work perfectly with nylon.

I can't say what will come, the judge may actually read my objection and exhibits and realize that the Girard Gibbs response simply misstates some of the facts and claims, but I don't know what likelihood there is for that.

I just wish more of you would have sent in objections. As it is, about 25-30 people objected out of about 30-40,000 motorcycles affected. I think the actual number affected is on the lower end of that range, so maybe about 30,000 bikes. that means that 1/10th of 1 percent objected.