e85 and a "stock" 1966 MGB

Off the top of my head, you'll need to have valve seats and valves (?) that don't need lead, plus ethanol tends to do nasty things to some types of rubber hose, plus there's the whole compression versus octane thing.

It's not going to be very simple, unless I'm way off base.

Hi, I run a '67 MGB in the UK , 4 Star 98 Octane leaded petrol was withdrawn here some 3 years ago. I switched immediately to using Super Octane ( Shell Optima) 98 Octane ( claimed) unleaded fuel together with Castrol's Valvemaster. Valvemaster is a phospate ester/upper cylinder lubricant added at 25ml per

25 Litres of fuel reputed to do the same job as the TEL additive which is no longer permitted. I hesitate to pay an enormous premium for the Octane improver grade, I do not believe in miracles.! I had to twiddle a bit with the mechanical Adv/Ret, proving to me that you cannot believe every 98 Octane claim you hear, but she has run about 15,000Miles without any valve recession symptoms. I have a feeling that using an alcohol fuel might just start a chain of problems, overheating one of them. On which subject...

One Mini skirted beauty watched me parking one day, & commented 'Cool Motor', I nearly responded, 'perhaps, but not in a traffic jam!' then realised she was not speaking my language!

Hope this helps

Enjoy

P '67 MGB '97 MGF

You don't say where you're located, but if you take a look at this site you'll see that (in the US) there are relatively few cars that can run this fuel.

They also indicate that a car can't really be converted to run it - here is why -

Dan D '65 B '76 B Central NJ USA

Leaded fuel has been off the market here in Canada for many years. Most of us who run old cars and/or classic bikes rework the heads and fit hardened exhaust valve seats. That stops the accelerated errosion which would otherwise ruin the heads swiftly. Using lead-substitute additives in each tank full works, but in the long run it makes sense to have the hardened seats installed the next time you have the head off.

The heavily ethanol-laced fuels are a bust in my opinion. For starters anyone who has ever run race engines on alcohol will tell you that it is possible to get great power that way, but only by using carb jets you could shove your finger through. You have to pour many times more alcohol into an engine in order to cover the same ground, so mileage can be expected to drop when you switch to ethanol blended fuel. In addition, rather than reducing pollution ethanol can actually increase smog because of it's greater volatility.

A few years ago folks in the US got all excited about the stuff and processing plants sprang up all over the country. About 70% of those plants have since gone belly up, but proponents of the 'alternative' fuel don't mention that.

Producing the stuff takes as much or more energy than you get out of it, which seems like a pretty poor recommendation for it as an eco-friendly substance.

Over the past few years the quality of Canadian gasoline, particularly the 'regular' grade has been going downhill at a rate of knots. We live in the bush, so I keep a supply of fuel on hand for our emergency generators as well as our B-GT and about a dozen classic bikes. In the last couple of years I started noticing that the stored fuel was going 'sour' much faster than it had in years gone by. After about 6 weeks of storage in plastic cans it starts to form a yellowish-orange sludge in the bottom of the cans, and some of my bikes are reluctant to fire on it. A chap in the business of making those plastic gas cans explained that some of the latest additives escape right through the body of the plastic cans. For that reason the state of California has banned the use of plastic gas cans with the exception of one brand which has a new type of material in it and which manages to contain the stuff.

We switched to steel military type jerry cans for storage, which made a noticeable difference but things still weren't right. When I use either of our 4 wheel drive vehicles for towing, I usually fill up with 'super' grade, and noticed that when I'd dropped the trailer the mileage we got, even with a relatively mild tuned 5.7 litre Chev small block, improved by about 10%. Now that is not what you'd normally expect. Higher grade gas can give you more 'grunt', but as a rule you should be using a tad more of it to do the same amount of work. In a mild engine with relatively low compression you wouldn't expect to notice any sort of real improvement, but we did in both vehicles. I had started using 'super' in any of the engines which are left idle for any length of time, hoping that the fuel might stay fresh longer, and that seemed to be the case.

The 'super' grade gas tended to stay fresh longer than 'regular' stuff ( both being no-lead of course here) even when stabilizer was added to the stored regular.

It's puzzled me for a while, then I realized that our government decreed that anti-knock agents used in other jurisdictions must be replaced with more 'eco friendly' additives, and that had lead to the oil companies adding about 5% ethanol to our juice. I'm now thinking that the corn-squeezings are in the regular stuff but not the 'super'.

To get back on track, I now run pretty well all the engines on the place on 'super', and the increased performance and mileage seem to balance out the increase in fuel cost. Even the 13 hp Honda engine on the bandsaw mill and the 11 hp. Honda on the generator run noticeably better on the higher grade fuel, in spite of modest compression ratings and very pedestrian states of tune. They shouldn't, but they do.

Our ' 70 B-GT has a fresh engine with hardened exh. valve seats, a half-race cam, 9 to 1 comp. and a pair of Mikuni 42 mm. flat-slide bike carbs. It runs very well indeed on no-lead super, and it will never be forced to ingest the 15% ethanol brew so beloved of misguided bunny-huggers.