Around here (Minneapolis/St. Paul Minnesota), glow fuel - regardless of what it’s for, is around $45 a gallon for SIG Champion 5/20 fuel. Boat and Car fuel is about $60/gal. When I can go out for the day and burn a whole gallon of fuel sometimes, it can get pretty expensive. 5% nitro fuel I can mix for about $6-7 a gallon which is mainly what I use in my aircraft engines. I use 20/12 fuel in my trucks which amounts to about $20/gal. Boat fuel is pretty close to the same as the cost of car fuel.

I get nitro online - last I paid about $80/gal with free shipping. I have a friend that can get it much cheaper, but the shipping is a pain. Nobody locally stocks it, so that’s a hard one for me. I use Klotz Techniplate synthetic because I got a bunch of it real cheap, but I don’t use much of it because most of my engines’ manufacturers spec castor oil which smells nicer and is a lot cheaper compared to what Klotz costs nowadays. Klotz cost me $12/quart about 6 years ago; I got 2 quarts. Still have 1-1/4 quarts left. Synthetics that mix in methanol have a bad habit of breaking down if run too hard, which I tend to do being more performance oriented, so I use more castor due to its cost and thermal stability being better than Klotz. Morgan’s sells the same kind of synthetic, and S&W fuels sells a good ester based synthetic that works quite well also. Castor oil can be had from a lot of sources; the cheapest place I’ve found is from Bulk Apothecary if I get 2 gallons at a time. Any castor oil for making cosmetics or soap will be filtered and not contain any Ricin. The ricin will be in the solids of the castor bean which is what’s filtered out. Ricin is bad stuff. Pricing on BA’s castor was about $25 a gallon (8lbs) and shipping to my door is around $22. Shipping 2 gallons is darn near the same as shipping 1 gallon, so it makes sense to get 2. Methanol is sourced locally. A fuel company about 20 miles south of me stocks about 5,000 gallons of methanol and it runs $2.75-$3.25/gal. I have two steel 5-gallon buckets I refill once every other season. Castor from the drug store works fine as long as it has no additives in it. Usually castor oil for human consumption can sometimes have sugar or flavorings added to it. These are to be avoided!!

I would suggest doing some calling around to hotrod and speed shops to find methanol and nitromethane. Shipping this stuff is pretty gnarly these days. You might be better off buying a 5-gallon bucket of a 50/50 blend of nitromethane and methanol just due to the hazmat being less offensive. Just factor that into your mixing ratios.