I have a bottle of Everclear with an inch of dust on it if anybody wants to try running it. There's one sip taken out it, and that was enough to convince me that it would probably run an engine!

 

There is a station that is selling E85 near me. A flex fuel vehicle is the only thing I know of that can run E85 safely. Long term use of E85 in a fuel not set up for it will probably damage it. You may end up with worse performance as well. Alcohol is corrosive so it probably cannot come in contact with anything rubber, that means you'll have to have all metal lines and no gaskets below the fuel levels in the carb. Probably also cannot use a bladder in the gas tank. Ethanol contains more oxygen then gasoline so you'll have to tune accordingly to get the optimal ratio.

I'm going to feel really sorry for anyone that ever gets in the situation where they are out of gas but happen to have a bottle of strong booze and they try to fuel their vehicle with it. If out in the middle of nowhere I'd probably just get smashed with it, it'd make the time go faster.

 

youll have to take my word on it but i know for a fact that home brewed hooch will and can run a 74'-75' chevy pickup! saw the stepdad pour it in and go to work. scouts honor even had custom brushed on paint job!

 

It's pretty common for people to add high levels of Ethanol to the gas on older cars to try to get them though emmissions (Phoenix, AZ requires emmissions starting with 1967 cars). Once running it'll stay running, but I'ts probably not good for it. Now having the other part water and disolved sugars is probably going to gum up the engine.

 

Interesting. I would not have thought you could use 85% ethanol in an engine designed for gasoline (petrol). The heat content of ethanol is so much less than gosoline. I would have thought an engine using this much ethanol would need to be re-jetted to flow a lot more ethanol into the air stream.

If you want to use 85% ethanol, I think you should up your compression ratio to 12:1 or maybe even 14:1. With these higher compression ratios the ethanol will start to give good performance. With lower compresson ratios ethanol will give very poor performance. Also ethanol will always have bad km/liter or miles/gallon numbers. Its just doesn't have that many BTU's per liter (BTU - British Thermal Units - sorry I don't know the metric equivalent - joules/??) Ethanol has a higher heat content that methanol. Athough ethanol has a lower heat content than gasoline; an ethanol designed engine will produce power equivalent to a gasoline engine. The Indianapolic cars in the US are powered only by alcohol and are not supercharged.

Luftwaffe WWII aircraft engines pioneered the use of nitrous oxide as a gasoline additive. Here in the USA, the AA fuel dragsters use superchargers and the engines are powered by nitromethane.

 

I'm from Tenessee and when I was young I saw a few of the cars the moonshiners used to run grain alchohole during the prohibition days. I'm pretty sure they just drilled out the jets and left a trail of black smoke. They could install a 30 gallon gas tank and deliver a 20 gallon load over a hundred miles. The country boys didn't care what damage was done to the engines they were making enough money to buy a new car every load. But they didn't, just tooled the engine up.

 

Hey, I've heard of Diesel cars and motorhomes running on vegetable oil. $900 converts the car. You need to start the car with the Diesel fuel and then you can switch over to the V oil. Do you want fries with that?

 

The Vette gets the gasoline.......I'll drink the alcohol

 

Well your boss tells a great story - but I'm betting he is embellishing. Course the Saab could have been the 2 stroke - But just how concentrated was this window cleaner - did he distill it himself -

why would anyone risk ruining an engine or fuel system to save a walk of a few miles -

I guess what I am saying is that I have a very healthy skepticim about this story!