Fuel additives and the cold

Q. Most gas now contains some ethanol. This is a form of alcohol. Alcohol absorbs water.

Does this mean that we no longer need to use dry-gas additives to prevent water in the fuel lines from freezing up?

A. Pretty much.

When the temperature drops below freezing, water in the car's tank can get sucked into the fuel line and freeze solid. This prevents fuel flow and makes your engine stop running.

Water is soluble in alcohol, including ethyl alcohol, which is what ethanol is. The commercial fuel-line drying products generally use isopropyl alcohol, not ethyl alcohol, but it really doesn't matter. Any water in the fuel system will mix with either of these alcohols and be burned off.

Q. I own a 2001 Chevrolet 1500 two-wheel-drive pickup with a 4.3-liter, V6 engine. I removed the distributor for repair. Now I can't figure out how to set it, or even how to check the ignition timing.

A. If you are looking for instructions on how to set the ignition timing with a timing light, you're out of luck. There is nothing in your distributor associated with the engine's ignition timing. It is controlled by trigger wheels on the crankshaft, by camshaft rotation, and by the computer.

If you've actually removed the distributor from the engine, however, it needs to be installed so that the rotor lines up with the appropriate plug-wire towers on the cap. This is easy if you marked the distributor housing with a Sharpie or a grease pencil before you pulled it out - oh, and if you haven't rotated the crankshaft.

If you have rotated it, life gets a little more complicated. You need to bring the number one piston to top dead center on its compression stroke. This might mean removing a valve cover to check whether both intake and exhaust valves are closed. Set the distributor rotor to 42 degrees before number one TDC and slide the distributor in. The distributor drive gears are helical and, as they slide home, the rotor will spin slightly and line up perfectly with the tower for plug-wire number one. Hopefully.

I suggest you consult the shop manual yourself.

Q. We have a 1990 Cadillac Eldorado that used to sometimes make us wait three minutes before it would start. It's part of the antitheft system. But eventually the time grew to two three-minute sequences. Now it's five, 10, or 20 three-minute sequences.

A shop charged us $100 just to investigate, and said that there were frayed wires in the steering column. They offered to charge us an additional $300 to take the steering column apart and do the job, with no guarantee of success.

Can't this be solved with permanent jumper wires around a problem or with a used computer from a wrecking yard?

A. Your Caddy has a Passkey antitheft system. These systems use a special ignition key with an embedded electronic resistor pellet or chip which was assigned an unlocking code at the factory.

If you try to crank the engine and the Passkey module doesn't sense the correct code or resistance rating it shuts down the whole system for three minutes. The module not only disables the starter, but also shuts down the fuel injection so that the car won't run even if you try to jump-start it by hooking up wires directly to the starter motor.

According to your shop, you've got bad wiring in the steering column. Maybe. Usually the problem with these cars is dirt or corrosion on the resistor pellet's contacts or on the contacts inside the ignition switch. Most of the time I can simply use some contact cleaner or some polish on a Q-tip.

If cleaning up doesn't help, then you may need to open the column and replace the clock spring or associated wiring.

Mike Allen is a senior editor for Popular Mechanics magazine. Questions should be sent via e-mail to driveit@nytimes.com.