I'm in the gasoline business down south.

Our customers near the lakes all buy conventional 93 oct and blended E10 for regular and midgrade (which are exactly the same product). This allows the boaters to use real gasoline in their high performance engines.

Ethanol does raise the octane rating but if it degrades it doesn't lower the octane of the gasoline it's mixed with. In the case of 93 octane the original blend is 55% premium (93 oct), 35% regular(87oct), 10% ethanol(117 oct).

I realize many other parts of the country are going to be different due to the dozens of blends mandated by local laws and I can't speak of how these various blends are configured or refined but hope this helps some understanding of what you are buying.

 

Now the carb question. Is there anything we carbers should do or are able to do to make improvements on the crap gas?

 

fuel isn't going to be an issue with my new 103" build, as it's a hybrid. it's going to burn gas and rubber. honestly though, it does suck that we have no clue as to what's really in our gas. only the wizards who are raking in the money know for real what's going on. oh well, at least we're able to get some sort of gas that will work in our bikes for now.

 

Please help us layman (or a least this layman) understand this statement. Ethanol certainly does enhance octane however it absorbs water which is inherint to storage, at which point it converts to other componds. How is octane maintained in that process? Thanks in advance for your clarification.

 

the main problem I have with ethanol,is it's a net loss to produce the stuff,last word i saw,it took 1.5 gallons of fuel to produce each gallon of ethanol,after you count the fuel used in growing the grain,etc,and all this for something that doesn't work as well?

 

I switched to avgas in all my recreation carb running products. I wonder if anyone has tried this on there HD. I noticed excellent improvements when going to Aviation Gas in my atv and mx products.

 

Not to mention the increased price of corn-related products, like milk, meat and so forth. How did we let this happen? Sheep.
I looked at the suggested RxP and Star Tron reviews. The ST is far cheaper, using so little of the product: .33 oz/5 gal. - bottle costing appx $12 would save $43 per bottle if I got 1mpg more in my pickup. RxP seems to have a devoted following with higher mpg claims. Not something I can guess a calculation for.

Woah!!! I have to add this on alcohol-related additives to ethanol (alcohol) fuel:
http://www.fuel-testers.com/marine_a...treatment.html
Of course, they're selling test kits for it and include any product with alcohol in it, including Star Tron - but if you are only using .33 oz. to 5 gals fuel, how much alcohol could that even be?

 

Why would I get 10% lower gas mileage in my pickup when using ethanol-added gasoline?

Thanx, RD.

 

This just in: the Lucas fuel/oil additive has given me no more FE, according to the scangauge in my truck. Prior tank I put a cheap octane booster from O'Reilly's Otto parts that gave me just 1mpg more.
FYI.

 

with ethanol fuel, more volume of fuel is required to achieve a stoichiometric combustion (complete burn)...This is why the stoichiometric A/F ration of regular gasoline is about 14.68:1 and stoich for ethanol fuel is about 14.3:1