Greg, Stewart, Treven,

The testing of various volatiles was an exercise to see what could be learned. What was learned is that the higher the cetane number to start with, the better. Also, it was hoped that some of the other volatiles, despite their shortcomings, might run cooler, mimicking the action of ether on throttling, assuming my conclusions about that are correct.

Today it was found that all the fuels benefited from the addition of ether. And they behaved in a similar fashion except the Camp fuel,, the Naphtha petroleum stuff. Plus, all benefited and behaved similar to kerosene with the addition of Amsoil cetane booster in that the CR had to be reduced considerably as the engine warmed up. As with kero, this was counterproductive to good throttling.

Conclusion,,, kerosene is still king.

And so is castor. The 50 weight Aviation oil was tried with the Mineral spirits and things went south as starting became a problem. Adding ether helped as did the Amsoil. But clearly, the castor was doing something better than the AV oil. Perhaps better compression seal under high heat.

About modified veggie oil. Castor is a veggie oil. Has anyone ventured to do the mods to castor? Why not, and what might we get if we did? Or has all of that been done for us, and then some, by Klotz?

And speaking of veggie oil, I don't think coconuts are vegetables but today, I also ran 80% kerosene and 20% coconut oil. Starting was a little fussy but we had a run in due course. Top end was 9K and idle was reliable at 3.5K. Transition was good. I was hoping that the coconut oil would burn and that we'd get a dry exhaust. It wasn't dry entirely but my unscientific paper towel test implied that we had very little oil coming out of the exhaust.

Next I tried a mix of 50/50 kero and coconut oil. The surprise was that we got an extra 500 RPM at the top. The idle remained 3.5K and transition was good. However, this time, if the idle was left too long, the engine cooled too much and the idle began to suffer. From there, acceleration became quite ragged. Much more oil came out of the engine but as the better RPMs indicate, a lot of the tropical oil must have been burning. Maybe all that hydrogen was doing something good.

Then I tried a 10% castor, 10% coconut, 80% kero mix. Why on earth the combination of oils was worse than either ingredient alone I can only speculate.
Starting, top end, idle,,, all suffered. ???? Damnifino. Got too dark to try ether or Amsoil.

So, one last thing to try with coconut juice and I'll be satisfied to use up the rest to make hash browns.

Maybe tomorrow, I'll also try Luke's special mix.

Treven,

I deliberately refrained from using the heat gun to keep the test pure. All runs were accomplished with a high ether prime and a half dozen or less, prime bursts. I listed the fuels in order of the easiest to start first and as mentioned, last out of the gate was the camp fuel. It appeared to have the most naphtha, was much harder to start.

In all of this, my perfect rod has now got some slop in it. Not much, but it's there when there wasn't any before. I'm speculating that the coconut oil, with a lighter viscosity than castor or Av oil, did not lube as well as I had hoped.

Finally, I'm holding back on trying various kero/alternate fuel blends as I'm waiting for some Amsoil, Sabre synthetic oil. They have to order the stuff, need to wait till someone needs a full case.