ORIGINAL: cmoulder
My SAP 180 is working so well with 89 octane pump gas that I am loath to mess with it, but wondering how much better it would be without the 10% ethanol. I have a marina nearby and seem to recall reading or hearing that boat gas doesn't have ethanol.
Ethanol has inherently less power than iso-octane (the main ingredient in gasoline). I recall reading somewhere that 10% ethanol pump gas has about 95% the power of non-alcohol bearing gasoline. Might have read that in Wikipedia (a wealth of info on gasoline in this free source)
Short of increasing compression and using 100UL or LL to get more power, this should be a simple experiment to see if pure gasoline indeed outperforms the 90-10 mix in this application.
Increasing compression is not necessarily an answer.... it may actually hurt the easy field manners of the engine. It might get very finicky and that wouldn't help anything. Curious to know if Todd has tried that tho