William Smith's Page

Ok, I'm running my lawn mower on E85! Woot! It took a little fiddling with the choke, but it runs just fine. Here is a list of things that I may do in the future.

Hotter Plugs
Increase jet size
Add weight to float

Doing these things would definitely help but would also mean you couldn't run gasoline if you had to. For now I'll just partially close the choke to correct the fuel mixture when on ethanol.

Cheers,
Bill.

Well, I'm doing a minor rebuild of the carburetor on a Kawasaki 21 HP V-Twin that sits on the back of my mower. So I'm thinking this machine will be the first to run ethanol at the old homestead here. I'm going to soak a couple of critical plastic carburetor parts in ethanol (E85 for now) to see how they stand up. Or not. If everything looks good then after the carburetor is assembled and installed and running on gasoline. I'll switch over to ethanol and see how the engine behaves. The jets in t… Continue

Well, I drove waaaayyy out of the way to get about 12 gallons of E85 in my gas cans. I will put 1 gallon in the 2008 Accent that my wife drives daily. I really don't see this being any problem as the car will run E10 according to the car manual. Right now I'm rebuilding the carb on the mower and will test the "rubber parts" in E85 before I do the final assembly. Then I plan on running the mower on full E85 and just adjust the fuel/air mixture with the choke till it runs smoothly. I could have re… Continue

These are the things I see that I need to accomplish to move myself towards self reliance in the fuel / energy game.


1. Test Cars / Equipment for ethanol compatibility.

2. Buy / Build working still.

3. Test runs of still to familiarize myself with operation, optimize output, determine capacity.

4. Test ethanol from still in equipment.

5. Find source of sugar cheap / free.

6. Setup up larger scale fermentation.

7. Scale up distillation.

8. Drive / farm / cut grass / run generator all for… Continue