Rupurt! what do you mean by 95 or 97 octane? is that on gasoline or the E85 fuel, because I don't know the octanage of E85.
Well the other reason that I used gasoline mixed with the E85 was for economy we all know that gasoline burns at a 1:2 ratio versus methanol and being that I didn't measure the rate at which E85 was burned I opted to use gasoline as my main base for the fuel, later I will do the E85 with castor oil and nitro to see at what rate it burns and what rpms do I get. I have already tried the E85/castor oil combination (E85 at 95% and castor oil 5% Zero nitro) and it burns ok, but the low idle is shaky; probably a little bit of nitro will help and maybe I can replace the glo plug with a long standard R/C plug with the idle bar.
The other advantage that I found by using this mixture is being able to use nitro with gasoline the E85 helps mix nitro with gasoline thus giving us a little bit of ZIP to our gas engines without having to go all methanol conversion.
Also the carb worked very well without any opening of fuel spray holes or any complicated conversions the only thing I recomend is using a bigger venturi, but that you can accomplish that by scraping some aluminum from the ventur until it measures .4oo inches (I did that anyway to improve the performance on my Ryobi engine)