Thread: E85

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I live in a small town in south central wisconsin and a mile out of town there's an ethonal plant, i've done some searches on the web and there are coversion kits out there for newer cars, they convert your car/truck to run on
E85 (85% ethonal and 15% gas) it's basicly moonshine made from corn with some gas added, some of the sites were also selling small stills that you could use to make your own E85 fuel, but you needed to get a permit from the ATF before you could start making E85, wondered if anyone tried running it in a carburated engine, from what i've heard it dosen't burn as hot as normal gas, I'm thinking a guy might have to run higher compression maybe change jets in the carb, play with the timing ect.. and you might get it to run fine? the ethonal plant dosen't sell the fuel right there, i'd have to drive a half hour to get it from a gas station, i also heard it cleans out the fuel system pretty good, might have an effect on rubber/plastic parts, gastkets in carb?

i have thought about this stuff to... any info would be greatly apprced... <yes i cant spell the word!>

i found some more info on some foums, alcohol fuels(E85) are like brake fluid, they like to absorb water, they like to eat rubber too, need to use steel or stainless steel lines, no aluminum, E85 has a 105 octane rating, from what i've read its like running alcohol, bigger jets in the carb, maybe a guy could use a water/fuel seperator like diesels use to cure the water in fuel problems.

I've converted my shop truck to E-85 a year or so ago when it became available here locally..... No problems with water, fuel lines, or any of the other horror stories about the fuel..... Living where I do, I'm surrounded by ethanol plants so availability is not an issue..... I know, before the scientific disortations start, it is not as efficient as gasoline!!! But, you can run more compression and timing because of the octane rating which spells more power in my book.

Rather then just bring up all the old arguments, you might want to search CHR for some older threads on E-85....

i tried a search on E85 and it sad there were no matches last night, today i tried again with E-85 and found some posts, i think there is alot of rumors and whatnot flying around about E-85, didn't want to start a fight, i haven't talked to anybody who has converted they'er carbed engine to E-85, how well do you think it would perform on a modified engine?

Works great!!! Two of the drag cars that I had a hand in building have both switched over to E-85....... This is from the chassis dyno tune last spring, 500 horse, a bit more on the torque. 460 Ford, .030 over, SCJ heads, solid lifter cam, and a 1050 Dominator....

The bottom graph is the air fuel ratio, for some reason the numbers on the side didn't print. But it started out rich and went down with RPM, at 5900 RPM it was 14.5. We played with the carb, got it to stay between 13.9 and 14.3 from idle to 6200 rpm.....