G'day Alan,
This may have been a factor, as unleaded petrol first came on the market here in 1985, and leaded petrol was finally phased out in 2002. Ethanol was never added to leaded petrol here, but in the early years of unleaded, there was no applicable fuel standard, and some of the blends were well over 10% ethanol.
The Victa prismatic fuel gauge was first offered in the 1970-71 model range, in the Corvette 2 and then new VC160 models only.
As far as I can determine, the last Victa model to feature the prismatic fuel gauge was the Powerplus self-propelled, one of the last of the full crankshaft 160cc models, in the mid 1980's.
So it would be no surprise if many of the older mowers were not economically repairable, after an encounter with ethanol blend fuel.
The cheapskate's way of avoiding this problem was to just break off the gauge, close to the cap. Intact gauge caps are rare here, for this reason.
