Was wondering what it would take to build a small block chevy to run on e-85. From what I understand ethanol has a much higher octane than gasoline so it would allow me to raise the compression quite a bit. It also sounds like the milage isn't as good with e-85 but here in the midwest there are ethanol plants popping up everywhere and this summer when gas hits 3 something a gallon I think e-85 will be much cheaper. Just wondering if anyone has any experience with this
Do a search. just read an article in US news on the subject. Here's the highlights just because I'm honest and have underated the milage available with e-85. Of 250,000 gas stations in the US 1,000 have E 85 available as of a month ago. They have no other way to ship it but by truck or train, no pipelines at this point. Average 1.5 gallons of e 85 to go the distance that 1 gallon of gas will take you. Average price per mile with E 85 is equal to 1 dollar a gallon more than gasoline. Basically you'll need a fuel system with no aluminum or rubber fuel lines, no rubber in your carb/carbs. An alcohol compatible fuel pump. That said its your car do what you want with it.
Thats basically correct. We have a whole fleet of E85 cars/trucks at work, but no rubber parts, all new injected stuff. You can't even overlook a small rubber line if youre gonna convert to E85. I would'nt bother.........
theres a loacal guy i here in central ia that runing e85 in a stoked fe powed 240z its deff somthing different i guess it preforms good on the street not sure how much compression he runing
Maybe it's a little early for e85 but I bet in the near future we'll be seeing a lot more of it, I see Edelbrock and Quick Fuel Technology have both come out with e85 performance carburetors. Maybe when prices come down a bit.
Uhhh... no. the mileage on a motor not set up for but merely converted to run on E85 is around 20% and not 50 like you quote. An engine actually built to run on E85 would be better. Pretty much all the flex fuel vehicles out there are merely converted. And the newer rubber is alcohol safe, you know made in the last 15 years, and they've been putting alcohol in your gas for about 20 some odd years...
there was a article in car craft about his very thing. I also saw a chart of fuel cost vs. non-e85 gasoline and in the end e85 isnt any better for mileage and it costs more but it may be better for the enviroment so I heard but who cares about that when you got 110 or so out of the pump and helping the earth!
I got the numbers straight from a reputable news magazine and the tests were run on vehicles made and sold to run on E85 and not converted. I've been in contact with GM performance and they are saying absolutely no rubber in the fuel system. There is a lot of difference in 10% alcohol and 85 percent alcohol. I had a link to the article I'll see if it still exists if not I'll send you the magazine. It would interest you. Here's the link for ya. http://www.usnews.com/usnews/news/articles/070204/12ethanol.htm Uh I was wrong on the gas station count there are only 180,000 gas stations in the US.
Converting a later model car likely would not be worth it because of the computers and rubber lines and what not, but what I'm talking about is building a hotrod from scratch. I have to build a gas tank and buy fuel lines, pump, and carb anyways so if I build the engine for it(higher compression, cam, ect.) I think you could get a lot of power on e85 with the benefit of getting it cheaper than race gas and from a pump, provided you have one near you.
If you've got a station in town and are planning on putzing around town and nothing else then you're in pretty good shape. You aren't going to save any money but some say that you can build a healtier motor. I'm not sure about the healthier motor I'm makeing more than 400 horse on pump gas now and its a mill that sees daily use. There aren't any e85 stores in the KC metro anyway so if I'm pretty basically out of the game. You might weed through the article a couple of folks did quite a bit of research on the subject. Granted they aren't rodders and they are looking at it in a bit of a politicle sense but if you can weed throuigh that there is some good info there.
one of my best friends has a '71 camaro ran a 12 in the 1/4 on VP race gas (c16) and it had all braided lines a fuel cell and electic fuel pump and we changed the gaskets in the carb to carbon composite(NO PAPER!) and jetted the carb up. changing only jets and fuel it last ran 11.20-11.25 et's. that much time shaved from changing to CHEAPER gas!!! now he can afford to drive it on the street from time to time, not so legal tough btw the camaro runs a 427 sitting at about 13.5to1 comp. i'll try it in my 383ci racetruck soon and see how it does. long story short i say use it. i like it and it smells GREAT, kinda like alcohol!
If it was legal how far could he drive it anyway? How many E85 stations you got in say a 200 mile radius of town. Last July we made a trip. A loop from KC though N cal down south and back to KC. We saw 2 stations that had E85 on the entire trip. One of them was out of E85 not that we cared our latemodel GM won't run on it anyway. But I asked the guy just attendent/cashier just out of curiousity he said next week they'd have a new shipment for sure.
you are exactly right it is hard to come by. here in vegas there's a few stations but i don't think i have seen any at all in AZ or CA. i'm saying for a rod or racecar something that you want to just dip around town in it is fine. he drives alot further on E85 than C16... C16 is $5.50ish a gallon here ONLY at the track.
One fo the stations was right off the interstate in N Cal, the other was on thw western edge of Wyoming. It was the one that was out of course.
Check this out, don't know anything about it just thought it looked cool. reverse intake engine apparently running on e85. http://cleverlever99.blogspot.com/2005/09/reverse-intake-engine.html
i think as it becomes more poplular and "accepted" stations will pop up everywhere. that's if it is succesful it might be the future but people thought we would be in flying cars by now...HELL NO! i still drag ass on speedbumps and road-dots!!! and i like it!
the intake on the sides!!! the exhaust on the top!!!AAAGGHHHH!!!!! ~theres smoke coming out of my ears and it smells like burnt clutch!~ that's sick though!
There are no vehicles by a major manufacturer in the USA made to run specifically on E85. They are flex fuel vehicles that are made to run on gasoline but will accept E85 and the computer will adjust for it. If they were made to run on E85 they would have 14:1 compression and wouldn't tolerate gasoline at all. And the folks at GM Performance better go look at the GM flex fuel vehicles, there's rubber in there folks.... not much but it's there. a list of alcohol resistant materials that you can get your "rubber" fuel lines in... Teflon Nitrile Viton Polypropylene Buna-N Neoprene rubber Non-metallic thermoset plastics Thermo plastic piping
they also need to get off this corn thing. the leading developer of the enzymes that are used to produce ethanol has even developed an enzyme to make it out of bio mass.... that's trash folks. http://www.novozymes.com/en
If you recall I mentioned that there were far better things to make it out of then food a long while back. The whole deal for E 85 is to get corn farmers back on their feet. No one could care less about the environment. I got no problem with farmers makeing a buck by the way. I know I'm an idiot but I'm pretty sure that there is a difference between rubber ( as we know it) and teflon and the guys at GM probably have a pretty damned good handle on it. Its highly doubtful that any major auto manufacturer will ever mass produce 14:1 motor to sell to the general public. You or I might but we are nutz, well at least half of us are. Ya know most of the time I'm not just pulling info out of my ass. It don't matter to me what you run your old hooptie on, hell you can build a nitro burner and try and drive it for all I care. All I was doing was quoteing an article I read in answer to a question.
I ran two tanks through my old 78 F250 when I was towing a project back in Iowa. I may have had slightly less mileage but I couldnt tell any difference and it was about 15 or 20 cents cheaper on the gallon I do remember that. When I bought it I throught what the hell IM gonna run both tanks dry and refill so I gave it a try. There was no difference as far as engine pings and I was fully loaded.
Like Sugar cane for one, but basically just about any crop.... even if it's gone bad... Better than paying them to not grow... The majority of what you get these days at the store isn't natural rubber though we still refer to it as rubber, like Kleenex. There are plenty of options there... E85 is 112 octane. at least 12:1 please... I know you're not. But the paper is misleading, all in all it was a decent article. Hell I caught two factual inacurracies in our paper here (and I'm talking the student paper that I work for, I read the repoorter the riot act over it ) in the last two days dealing with ethanol. Bush came to Raleigh because the Novozymes plant is here. They need to do better research.
I'm thinking that if you're scratch-building a car and want to run it on E-85 you can get close to the same MPG as gas by bumping up the compression ratio and putting in a taller rear gear. Less revs on the highway and similar performance resulting from the added horsepower/torque. The same holds true with accelleration. Just be sure that the components you choose when you build your fuel system are combatible with the corrosive properties of alchohol. Tuning an E-85 system should be no more tricky than tuning for gasoline. Plug readings take a little longer because you get less (if any) soot than you would with gas. 2 or 3 years ago we had over 60 stations in Minnesota selling E-85 and I'm sure there are more today. The price of E-85 per gallon is less than that of 92 octane gasoline too.
Hell Z sawdust. We've been trying to keep the saw mills from burning sawdust since the 60s. Makes good high quality alcohol. You can make alcohol out of about any vegatable when it rots. I think they are claiming that the new corvette mill is 12:1 or something like it, but its not an aclhy mill. You can run aluminum mills at a higher compression ration that cast iron. I've read about the enzym thing from what I understand they are working on a cold process so you don't have to burn fossil fuel to make fossil fuel substitute. I don't recall where I read it but if I find it again I'll shoot it off to ya. Johnny I'm thinking that the bulk of the e85 stations are centered around the e85 plants. If you lived in that little town in Iowa where the whole town is involved in the process it would make perfect sense to build an e85 vehicle at least for local travel. A specific purpose built mill is the only way to go with it, the problem is at least for the time being and probably for at least for the next 10-15 years is that you can't go anywhere. You're stuck where the station is. Its like the fella that was building a blower motor because they have an e85 station in the denver metroplex. yea a blower motor is your best bet for high altitude, but he's stuck there. He can't even drive that bad boy to the HAMB drags or even down to see guiseart in KS. I personally can't live that way. if my daughter calls today and has an emergency I gotta be in the rod and gone. it still takes me about 18-20 hours to get there, but if my rod were an e85 rod or any sort of alchy burner I'd have to say sorry honey you're on your own.
Yep the enzyme stuff is definately the new wave of ethanol production. It's reall neat stuff and a lot of the research is being done at the university I presently work at. Pretty neat stuff to talk to the professors about, they're surprised when the tattooed IT guy knows about it... and correct again on the stations being centered around the production facilities. NC is getting 2 plants pretty soon I can't wait, and it seems to be a trend across the country as well...
my buddy just got out of prison and they made alcohol out of rotting bread and fruit. i wonder if the E85 companys are hiring? i should let him know about this possible job for him!!! LOL
We have the e 85 stuff all over the place around here...... but this is corn country! I have always wondered if it would cause any troubles to run the poncho way down and put in 10 gallons of the stuff to see how the 472 runs off it. Will a small amount like that wreck stuff?
Here's my $.02 - if you're going to drive the thing go gas, if you're going to race it and trailer it E85. Reasoning - you can haul enough E85 for a race weekend, but on a cruise across country - or heck even across town E85 may not be available and putting straight gas or E10 in the tank it's going to run super rich and really crummy. Unless of course you're going to do an EFI setup that you can have multiple fuel maps - then you can switch between fuels. And LasVegasDirtyBird - if your buddy got better mileage with E85 then he was WAY over-jetted rich or timing retarded bad - it takes more fuel per lb of air to get stoich with E85 vs gasoline (I can look it up but it's a significant amount more) If that's the case then that would explain the low ET on race fuel too. Edit - Gasoline is 14.7:1 and E85 is 9.7:1 - that means 14.7lbs of air for every 1 lb of fuel for gasoline, and to pump the same 14.7lbs of air and burn E85 it's going to require 1.515 lbs of E85.
The Jalopy Journal
