Forged crank?

KMK172008 said:
you have to upgrade almost everything the eathanol touches if your gonna run it off of e-85. also expect a huge drop in fuel economy. but yea it should make like 250 hp or more when properly tuned to run eathanol

No - just anything with an elastomer. Hoses and the like, mainly.

EtOH can be mildly corrosive to aluminum, but fuel hardlines are stainless, injector bodies and pintles are usually stainless, and it's not in the intake enough to be a major problem (since the intake should have a fine layer of aluminum oxide from atmospheric corrosion anyhow, it will serve to protect.) IIRC, EtOH is not corrosive to steel or iron alloys, so the valves and suchlike will be fine.

You'll have to tune for the different stoich ratio (I don't recall what it is, but I'm thinking somewhere around 8:1,) which is going to require re-mapping of fuel curves, but you shouldn't need to remap ignition overmuch. And, as stated, you'll get a 15-20-point boost in octane number, so you can run re-mapped timing for power.

I've been wanting to know more of the nuts and bolts of how "flex fuel" vehicles work, and see if the system can't be expanded. Imagine a vehicle that can run on most things flammable - gasoline, EtOH, MeOH, propane, acetylene, Bacardi 151, ...
 
KMK172008 said:
I thought Flex-Fuel cars could only run on ethanol and gas.

G100, E15, and E85 usually.

Theoretically, there isn't a lot of reason you can't run an Otto cycle (spark ignition) engine on anything flammable - it's just being able to adjusting the tuning on the fly. "We can rebuild him - we have the technology!"
 
seanyb505 said:
Grab a cummins straight six and say you made it yourself

Cummins six would be way too heavy and torquey for the little Cherokee. Cummins four are rare and really expensive.

It's all a pipe dream, I'm just trying to work out what it would require.
 
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