> David Carment writes:

> A Gas company up here in Ottawa has Ethanol blend at the same price as
> regular. I asked him if it was good for air cooled engines and his answer
> was it has 15% higher octane, runs cleaner and cooler. Any opinions,
> advice, experience with using ethonal blend  for air-cooled Vanagon engines?
> 
> BTW its 55 cents CDN per litre up here.....DC 
> 
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
> There was an interesting article in _Porsche Panorama_ about oxygenated fuels
  about a year ago. On vehicles with oxygen sensors, very little changes 
  except fuel mileage which drops (there's less heat available in Ethanol). On
  vehicles without O2 Sensors, exhaust emissions were shown to drop along with
  driveability and fuel economy. The air to fuel ratio for ethanol is different
  than that for gasoline (numerically lower) so unless one can richen up their
  mixture the engine effectively runs lean. 

  There was also considerable discussion of the corrosive nature of the 
  oxygenators. Although not as bad as methanol, Ethanol is more corrosive
  than gasoline. The article suggested using gasoline containing MTBE (Methyl
  Tertiary Butyl Ether???) because it is less corrosive but I have not been 
  able to find a gas station employee yet who could tell me what their      
  company was using as an oxygenator. The article said that ethanol smells
  sweet and MTBE smells like formaldehyde. I think all gasoline smells like
  sh*t, so I haven't followed this up.

  Dave Kautz
  '74 Westfalia
  sh*t.