Treven,

Exactly right. The less ether, the more you have to be tighter to start and then to back off on the compression once running. And when I ran no ether with 10% cetane booster, this characteristic became even more prominent.

Right again. The bushings are undersized when pressed in and then both holes are drilled at the same time to ensure that they are square to one another. I use progressively larger bits in very small increments to sneak up on a bore that is tight on the pin. Then I make up a lap, on the lathe, out of plain old hardwood dowel. This will have a just snug fit on the bushing and then I apply coarse rubbing compound to the dowel/lap with lots of oil and spin the lap in the bushings a few seconds at a time till I get a fit to die for. Absolutely on the money, no slop but free to spin. The problem here is that if the crank to cylinder fit isn't EXACTLY square, you get binding through rotation of the crank. I've done many of these this way and out of some dozen, only had a problem with one. Not bad.

Yes, I upped the oil to some, 25 or 30% and nothing good, (but nothing bad) happened that I could determine.

The use of naphtha came about because just at the moment, I didn't have any plain ole gas to try. So I used naphtha instead. Worked fine, I guess. The mix was derived from DSE's formula for use with their magic ingredient. I forgot to mention that I mixed up their formula without their ingredient to see if it really did anything. After the runs on video, I added their ingredient and on this engine, on this day, it did nothing. As Greg pointed out and as the input on biodiesel forums indicates, there's no there there. But that jury is still out. We may need more of it on our little engines. More testing may be revealing.

So, after running some 12 ounces of the veggie fuel, the rods are still tight on the pins. Inspection under the head showed no carbon build up despite all that black oil coming out.

Greg,

How much oil is being burned is an excellent question and is good thing to find out to make the experiment more complete. How to do that? Long tube attached to the muffler with the exit inside a jar. Also, mileage will be another item to consider. There appears to be a LOT more oil being expelled than normal. Still, we know that oil is being burned. We have only 22% volatiles and we have NEARLY full power. And well, the smell is like peanut breath only in this case it's sunflower seeds.