No rubber gas lines, no rubber gaskets in gas tank, i.e. gas cap, petc0ck seal, etc.  I think with the petc0ck conversion and nitrile gaskets you'd be ok there.

Inside the carb, I'm not familiar enough with the make up, but any rubber/softer oil based product will have to go, which there may not be any.

With such a conversion, you'd be perfectly safe running 10.5-11:1 compression.  You could boost compression and cooling effect even more by running straight ethanol (and lower cost fuel, about 80% is fine.)  With no timing/compression mods your fuel economy will suffer, but 2 points extra compression would bring that back, however you'd be unable to run pump gasoline if you optimized for ethanol.

One main change that would need to be made in the carb is much richer jetting.  You need approximately 10-15% richer jetting, but Lancer's carb tuning steps would dial you in perfectly.  If  your currently running a 150 main, I'd suggest starting with a 165 and tune from there.  Although maybe a 160 would work fine with E85.

I tried to be comprehensive here, but actual changes may be significantly less involved.  You'd probably be ok just changing out the fuel line and re-jetting.  As other gaskets dissolve over time, they could be replaced...

Hope this helps.  

Thanks for the input.  Yeah, I'd already thought about fuel lines and gaskets dealing directly with fuel, as well as certain carb parts.  I'm running an Amal Mk2 carb and its jet sizes are wholly different than
those of the Mikuni but I get the point.  I hadn't thought about rejetting but it makes perfect sense.  I don't think I want to alter compression though I may consider one of Lancer's performance cams.  I'd like to keep it as multi-fuel as possible.  It's easy enough to swap jets in this carb.  I doubt I'd even bother with a dial-a-jet but it's a thought.

For sure don't run it without an inline filter - It wouldn't suprise me to see unexpect bits erode - like the rubber tip of the float needle.

Rob, I'm glad you posted the conversion link.  I'll take this time to tell EVERYONE...

If you make your own fuel out of alcohol, don't waste your time and money making 200 proof alcohol!  There's no good reason to mix alcohol and gasoline.  An engine can easily be converted to run on 140-170 proof alcohol with no problem.  And like I said before, it will have higher octane, and run cooler than if you mix it with gasoline.  Think of it as FREE WATER INJECTION.  Anybody remember the glory days of water injected hot rods?    Back then, anyone could make enough power to blow their engine up  

barry68v10 wrote on 12/31/69 at 16:00:04:

Aye.  From what I've been reading, I can expect it to get about 10%-15% less mileage but cost about 25% less.  I haven't checked the prices in my area but if I convert mine, I could still run gasoline also.  I basically have to change the jets.  I don't think the preheater element would be a problem with gas but it would be simple enough to bypass it.  The main problem would be the decreased range on a tankful of alcohol but in town that's not really a problem.  At this point I'm down to two things.  The first is that I think I might be advised to use a tank coating to inhibit potential rust caused by the moisture in alcohol.  The second is my major roadblock; the plastic parts and diaphragm of the petc0ck.  I'm not quite sure how to handle that except possibly an entirely new petc0ck.

Quote:


Filling the crankcase with oil can solve that problem  

Bottom line is, those two facts have nothing to do with each other (car converted to ethanol vs. no power, horrible economy, smoke.)

By ALL accounts alcohol burns cleaner, provides smoother power and can produce lots more power if you have the CR to use it.  Did I mention Dragsters and other race applications use alcohol?  Also, vehicles in Brazil (and other countries) use it (alcohol) and get fairly long life out of their engines despite lack of the regular mnx most of our cars enjoy in the US and Europe.

At this point, I am planning on slowly making the necessary changes to my Savage to make her a "flex-fuel" vehicle.  Then I'll be able to run any combination of ethanol and/or gasoline.  While ethanol provides a cleaner burning, cooler running engine with lower emissions, the downsides are that you get less mileage and the jetting has to change because alcohol needs to be a richer mix.  Most flex-fuel vehicles use electronic sensors and fuel injection to deal with mixture changes as fuels vary.  I plan to try to use a Dial-A-Jet to allow me to vary jetting for different mixes instead of manually swapping main jets.  It's still manual but faster and easier than jet swapping each time I switch fuels.  If that doesn't work, I'll just have to go the manual route if I change fuels.  A TourTank is part of the plan because of the decreased mileage of alcohol.