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The reason things smell like gasoline after many years is because of some of the components of gasoline that are especially "smelly." They act like a kind of oil, or a sludge. In the lab, they drive the analytical instruments crazy, so you have to dilute the samples to get it to go through. The same components will pretty much soak into the metal and it's really hard to get rid of them, and even in minute amounts, you can still smell them. Albeit, you should be very careful of gasoline vapors; they are what makes you car's engine "fire up" after all. This stuff I've learned after working for years in an EPA lab, analyzing dirt contaminated (or not) with gasoline from storage tanks. thx