I personally blame everyone that buys a new car/truck that doesn't get better fuel economy than my 40 year old foul running beater. If I can get 18-20 with a carb no overdrive and poor aerodynamics what's their excuse. My sister in law has a liberty with the same size motor mpi overdrive same mileage.

I don't blame anyone. It just is... If it's available and you can affort it, get it, burn it.

D/W

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If it ain't broke, fix it!

I've been waiting for Congress to make distillation legal. They keep tabling legislation that would let those of us who want to, privately distill Ethanol. I've got all the waste I need for fuel and mash.
Built a Reflux Head, but haven't finished it up; waiting on the US Government. Might as well sell it for scrap. They won't let me use it.

CJ

i'm pretty sure it is legal but ethanol sounds like a lot of work. i think the liscensing only allows people in rural areas to make it anyway. something about me blowing up my neighbors that scares the usgovt. most new cars could run e-85, but i have personally never seen it in any gas stations.

-james

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I can look out my window and see ADM the largest producer of ethanol in the world. Their corporate headquarter is in town. E85 is available all over this area but the people that use it have been complaining of dramatically decreased fuel economy. My bosses brother in law used it in his ram and said the fuel economy was cut in half. E85 is looking like it is going to be a pipe dream or at least the tree huggers fantasy.

Before anybody gets the wrong idea about distilling alcohol at home, visit the BATF web site. It get's pretty specific about it. The fines are astronomical, and the enforced cubicle living could be inconvenient.

To my knowledge, there have been no waivers for private distillation awarded. The requirements of the fed are incredibly difficult to meet. Only large companies can jump through all the hoops, maintain the records, and meet inspection requirements.

Unless the legislation that got nuked a few years ago gets reintroduced, we will not have the freedoms of, say, New Zealand. It is legal there for beverage purposes. I don't know if they allow our southern friends to burn it in their cars though. Anybody from New Zealand know?
We'd need a lot of waste for heat production to run the process economically. If you run it off conventional heat sources it'd cost too much. So now we're talking about another pollution source.
Now assume that your 17MPG car gets 8MPG on Alcohol. I'm probably being optimistic. It'd sure smell nice though!

Road tax introduces a bunch of extra headaches. The government won't trust people to report accurate miles driven or therms used. That's why we can't shift over to CNG easily here. The home fueling option with CNG, a very clean alternative, would be very convenient for some people. It's spendy up front though.
There's a CNG refueling product available that hooks into the Natural Gas at your house, and pumps your tank up to 5000PSIG, over night. It's supposed to be tested in a California pilot program. Not sure if they have any installed now or not. Fast fueling can be conducted by commercial systems in just a few minutes.
On the bright side, emissions for CNG are a lot lower than that of ULEV gasoline vehicles. The power's pretty good too.

If everybody shifted over to it, the Natural Gas delivery infrastructure would have to be beefed up. Fuel economy of CNG vehicles is pretty good. The Honda Civic CNG could go ~200 Miles. Conceivable for a commuter car, but I wouldn't be taking off for Salt Lake City in it. The infrastructure isn't present.

Honda has their hydrogen FCV up to 1.9MPG equivalent now. Whoopee. (And it's the best so far...) While it's the cleanest environmentally at the tail pipe, production has some hurdles to clear.

One of the development companies I've been watching can be viewed at starrotor.com
They still don't have a working model of a gerotor engine, but if it's even 2/3's as good as their models predict, it would be a tremendous leap forward. They don't plan to build a automotive engine in the near future though. First they are looking at power generation.
They have built a 70% efficient compressor that appears to work very well as an expander. Check out their engine page.

I'll keep dreaming.

90MPG in my Valiant? On Ethanol?

Probably not.

CJ

My daily driver is a 4 beater, to be more precise :
Renault Laguna 1,6 litre 16 valve 110 BHP
does i believe something like 20 mpg or more.

The old lady : 1969 Dodga Dart GT 170 CID
mpg ??? no idea cause i can't drive it for the moment ( no brakes )

but this is what i see
1 litre of gasoline = 0.26 us gal
1 Euro = 1.25 US Dollar
our nice Belgian gas price 1.51 Euro for 1 litre of gasoline

so 1 gallon gasoline = 7,15 US dollars

I would be glad with a 3 USD / Gallon price!!!!

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In Sweden, if we use a standard engine, no modifications, blend 1 part E85 and 2 part gasoline.
If you use pure E85 you have to change "jets" 30% bigger to get it going.
If you use the "blending", you would have the same or better mpg.
If you use pure E85 with bigger jets, you get a higher mpg, but a better price on the fuel.

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Lasse

Signet -66 225
Holley 600 Offy-5270 Dutra Dual,regrind. cam 272 0,420 110, head shaved 0.100 slight.ported
MSD6A
A904
7 1/4 3.23

back in the 80's, we had that sucky I e85 / 2 gas parts mix avalible straight from the pump. They called that Älcohonaphta and it sucked. Your car pinged, behaved like crap and all the seals in your carb and just about everywhere soaked in that crap would fail in no time.

Everybody is concerned about oil things, but when some inventor pops up with something new you suddenly don't hear about him or his work anymore. I'm not being funny on behalf of fish carbs now, I'm thinking of an argentinian engineer that developed a fuel made out of sunflower seeds that replaces gas w/o any modifications. The stuff worked, no kidding. Take a guess at who buyed his project.... an Oil company. Never heard of that again. They stuck that in a drawer and let it sit for a while.

I'm not going all delirious on this. I know one of the guys who worked with the inventor. All the team was nerdy looking engineers working for a small town college here in argentina. They all became rich and you can get a single word outta their mouths about this matter.

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Juan Ignacio Caino

Please use e-mail button istead of PM'ing. I do log in sometimes but I'll be answering quicker thru e-mail.

Juan,

*start rant*

No offense to those people, but they are sellouts. If you discoverd an alternate fuel and wanted to get it out to the world, why on earth would you sell it to an oil company? To me, they are no different then the oil company, they just wanted to get rich.

If they really wanted to get good use out of their work, instead of just trading it in for money they should of published it somewhere publically. True they wouldn't become rich immediately, but now they are rich nobodies instead of famous inventors.

*end rant*

...those evil, Godless oil companies!!! Hrrrmmmpppfff!!!!!

I'd take a thousand evil oil companies to my "friends" at Allstate. If you want to find crooks, look no further than an insurance company or local county commission.

D/W

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If it ain't broke, fix it!

I may add, that since they already got rich with their invention, why they don't pass it down to another person who may be interested in producing it... they are nothing less than sellouts, and you've been so kind with them using that only calificative. Oil companies conspiracy funny scams aside, if they get away with killing alternate energy sources is cuz some people are playing their dirty little game. This is no 1950's and they're not preston tuckers.... we have internet and many other tools that makes almost impossible to "silence out" this kinda things. Is outrageous.

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Juan Ignacio Caino

Please use e-mail button istead of PM'ing. I do log in sometimes but I'll be answering quicker thru e-mail.

Actually, 20years ago in Indiana I ran Kokolene (sp?) gas with ethanol in it in my '75 /6 - it worked great and I even bumped up the timing a few degrees to take advantage of the fact it didn't ping like 89 unleaded, even though the advertised octane was also 89. I've no idea why that brand of gasahol worked really well and others didn't, but I suspect they started with a better quality gasoline.

thats it, im going french frie grease car. $1000 for the conversion kit, and need a diesel engine, and aproximately no more than $10 a month for diesel fuel!!!!!

Are you sure that the sunflower seed formula wasn't a plan to replace diesel fuel rather than gasoline? That one's a bit easier to do, and the techniques are pretty well known. But I suspect that either way, it would be more expensive than gasoline. Here's how I see it.

Whatever it is, it's probably based on sunflower oil.

Sunflower oil is pricier than gasoline at retail. I haven't been shopping for any recently, but if it's around $2 a liter (not unreasonably high), that would make it about $8 a gallon.

They probably need extra steps to turn it into a useable motor fuel, raising the price further. Then they'd have to add motor fuel taxes. So, this probably would be more expensive than gasoline.

There's also a proposal for making hydrogen from sunflower oil, but that's a lot of work.

If this process is not likely to be a viable substitute for gasoline in the near future, selling it to oil companies would make perfect sense. After all, they're going to need a product to sell when they run out of oil.

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"Mad Scientist" Matt Cramer
'66 Dart - turbocharged 225
My blog - Mad Scientist Matt's Lair