When I take my 96 LT1 apart for inspection and machine work before installin in my IROC, should I consider increasing the compression to compensate for the new 10% etanol in all gasoline? I know that etanol is less efficient and we will all have a milage and power reduction May 1st. Any ideas on a prefered compression ratio for an LT4 Hot Cam with shorty headers and maybe head work? Head work decision is yet to be made.

Thanks for feed back and remember those representing us did this and it will add to our fuel costs. Etanol can not be transported in pipe lines, must be transported by truck or rail and our production capacity is not adequate to meet demand. Thank your congressman and senator for this. I have done so already.

 

10% ethanol gasoline here has an octane rating of 85. I wouldn't build an engine counting on the current octane rating staying the same if I were you.

This oxygenated fuel thing is a political football. Where it bounces next session is anybody's guess.

 

57 think you can ship some of 85 octane here? all I can get is 87.

wonder if the car would like that a little more? I know running 91 sucks 87 is good so thinking 85 might be better :shrug:

 

hmm, yea I heard rotaries like *less* octane, due to their wacky design...

however that's a subject for a rotary forum isn't it?

 

Thats odd, 10% ethanol (gasohol) typically has a higher octane rating than just gasoline. The only pumps I've seen sell it had it at 89 octane, I've read that it can be over 100 octane. I personally hope ethanol is the future, and look forward to new reaerch in that area. It will lower our dependency on foreign fuel and put money in the pockets of American farmers. I'm afraid I don't know what your referring to though. Is gasoline going to contain 10% ethanol in the near future? I highly doubt you will notice many if any adverse effects from the added alcohol.

 

MTBE (summer blend) has finally been removed. Problem is that ethanol will be in all gas starting May 1. Can't make enough of it to support what the new bill requires Our all knowing in Congress and Senate have done it again. Can't send it through pipelines so that means rail and truck to places it will be blended.

I don't expect anything senseable from Washington in the near future. MTBE = acid rain and ended up in the water supplies. This has been well known for a long time and nothing was done until a few months ago and we will pay for it.

Support farmers? Farmers = Archer Danials Midland...maybe a few farmers but I don't think a lot of them are still around in the definition we all think of (mom and pop farms)

 

I was running gasohol in my V6 Vega from '82-'85 while I was in college. The pump always said 90 octane. That's because that's what Nebraska does. In fact, they still are doing it that way.

In the higher elevations of Colorado (and Wyoming and Montana, for that matter), "regular" only has to be 85 octane. There isn't the political mileage to be gained by the higher number on Colorado gas pumps, so they just refine the gasoline to a lower octane so the resulting octane with 10% ethanol is still only 85.

Now, the E85 (85% ethanol, 15% gasoline) I put in the '57 for the first time this past weekend has an octane rating of 105.

 

10% ethanol in everything here in Mass. 87 through 93 octane. I personally don't like it. Both of my V8's seem to ping now and mileage seems to have gone down. who knows what's being chemically attacked by the alcohol. not to mention the water it carries. and it's still too damn expensive, thanks to congress who today upheld the ban on off-shore drilling -we'll be foreign dependant for a long time. Although China via Cuba can drill all they want 30 miles off Florida.

 

here in idaho (my location maybe 2000ft or so) there are two stations that I know of using E10. one has 86-88-89-91 think that is sage travel plazza truck stop thingy. the other is a sinclar stinker station and they have 87-89-91. just like the rest of the gasses up here

 

I also have have experience with pre-ignition with the 10% here in NJ. So much so that I had to re-map my gen 6 DFI and remove timing more than I thought I had to. Running a little over 10 to 1 -- never had problems with this with the previous Sunoco 94 -- but now its the "new" 93 and I hate it.

J383

 

You mean "ethanol cannot be transported in OIL pipelines" - At least not yet, anyway. It can be transported in pipelines. The next time I take a little drive west I'll try to get photos of a plant that pipes its product to a fuel depot about 45 miles away.

As for the LT1, you should be fine with the 10.5-ish compression it already has. Then again, when I went through mine, I bumped it to 10.8 or so. Not so much for ethanol (which I've been using since 1976) but because the PCM for an LT1 can easily handle the larger swings in timing necessary to control detonation. I also went with larger valves that occupied more of the chamber, since they complimented the larger ports. If you don't bump the compression, tuning for 7-8° more timing advance across nearly the whole range can recover some of the power and more. You can go een more advanced at low loar, low RPM cruise. Then again, you can always do both the programming and the extra squeeze.

And where gasolie doesn't like/need quite as much heat, alcohols like it. Don't worry too much about a cold air intake or TB coolant bypass. Take some hints from top-fuelers who have been using alcohol to make thousands of HP for decades.

10% is nothing. It doesn't get serious until you get to about 25-27%, when power starts to fall off if you haven't built for it.

 

And if you would like to discuss the other oxygenates commonly used in gasoline, like ethers, you may want to know that MTBE and the other common fuel additive ethers are manufactured by reacting refinery petrochemicals with alcohol. Guess who uses alcohol in their fuel? Even "non-alcohol" fuel requires it. And we're not meeting demand? Hmmm....