All gasoline vehicles are capable of operating on gasoline/ethanol blends with up to 10% ethanol and that includes our classic Mustangs without altering anything. In fact, some states require the seasonal or year-round use of up to 10% ethanol as an oxygenate additive to gasoline to mitigate ozone formation. These low percentage oxygenate blends are not classified as alternative fuels. Pure ethanol vehicles as those specifically manufactured to be capable of running on up to 85% denatured ethanol, 15% gasoline (E85), or any mixture of the two up to the 85% ethanol limit.

 

i use denatured alcohal to pass emissions with my 460 i go to ace and get a gallon of it and add it when i fill up on the way to the test

 

I suppose that would work. If you wanted to run 85% ethanol, you would have to do some head work though. I wouldn't think it would be worth it on our classics though. But, if you want to convert, here is how you do it.
http://running_on_alcohol.tripod.com/id26.html

 

Didn't you old-timers used to run "Ethyl" back in the day? I'm a bit young to remember exactly, but I thought maybe in the 70's that was one of the grades of fuel available here in CA. I think it was regular, unleaded and Ethyl.

 

Ethyl had no ethanol. It was the premium gas of today (except I seem to remember it was 93 octane instead of today's 91 octane). I believe the "ethyl" name referred to the use of the octane boosting lead compounds. I can't remember the name right now but it was something like tetraethyl lead...

 

Soaring,

Skimmed the link, and plan on reading it through tonight. I'm not disputing the molecular seive (I assume that is nanofiltration or possibly reverse osmosis) to remove the last 3% of water, but I know of one other way to remove that last 3%. In college, we ran a small distillation column (25 foot, can't remember the number of trays) to produce 100% ethanol. The key is the addition of benzene. You will get a little carry over of benzene unless you are extremely careful, but that won't be bad in terms of using it for fuel. Still not practicle, but it is a means of getting "pure" ethanol through distillation.

Also, it would be a really bad idea to use an open flame on a distillation column containing ethanol and benzene.[sm=badbadbad.gif]

 

Yeah, we had 3 grades of leaded gas. The premium grade was Tetraethyl or Ethyl or sometimes referred to as TEL. Leaded gas has two purposes. It was a cheap way to improve octane. The gas coming out of the refineries was somewhere in the 60 range before they added lead to it. Lead also served as an antiknock agent. But, when the EPA finally convinced enough folks to get rid of the lead for environmental reasons, the cars were starting to use Catalytic converters, and the leaded gas would foul the converters.

 

my dad used to tell me how you could get 102 octane at the pump. i swear i was born in the wrong generation

 

You can still get leaded gas. That is if you can figure out how to burn aircraft fuel in your stock Mustang.

 

the "lead" in gas served on other purpose lubricate and pretect the soft metal valve seats and i have ran aircraft fuel in my engine not much i just blended it with 91 i just told the guy that my car needed some high octane fuel at the local municipal airport he let me pull up to the pump and add 3 gallons