Ethanol in Gasoline and your Truck's Miles Per Gallon

Jesse Crandle and I were talking about fuel treatments on ChrisFix's latest video about whether a "...fuel additive can bring you better economy" treatment and whether it improved, and I felt we had such good material that I decided it should become an article.

Jesse said, "On that note... I'd be VERY interested to see a 0% ethanol gas vs 10% ethanol gas comparison. Ethanol is, in my opinion, the root of all vehicular evil. Gas with ethanol "goes bad" largely because ethanol attracts water, so it literally puts water in your fuel just from humidity. Horrible horrible stuff, plus it eats the older seals in systems. I've thought about doing an E85 conversion just to be sure my system is up to par for handling the ethanol they put in gas."

I ended up responding like this:

"Alright. I was on a major across the country road trip. Only met one traveler that traveled two more states than me since on one side of the trip I was two states into the country...in Tennessee there was a gas station off the beaten trail with my choice of gasoline.

I tried their ethanol free gasoline. Most areas had 15% ethanol and they had cut it out. Directly proportional to the extra fuel that was gasoline, was how much further that tank went!

My knock sensor is bad and couldn't know to retard the timing since the fuel burned too much easier. Without my knock sensor being bad I'd probably never have noticed the difference. That part was scary, but the fact is, by my math ethanol does nothing to move my car forward and is filler like they add to modern dog food.

Just makes dogs poop more."

LOL. I'm so used to talking about my car's miles per gallon, but in this case I was driving my 2004 Nissan Frontier 4x4 truck.

Within seconds, the fuel had mixed enough to make a slight pinging or knocking in my engine. I had just left the gas station. I immediately came back to the gas station panicked. What was I to do? Well, since my knock sensor had failed where I lived in higher elevation just before my trip (too late to even order the part), I figured, “Well, it doesn't even set a check engine light. I only found the code since I have the habit of checking. It'll be okay.” But as I drove below 3,300 feet of altitude into areas that were as little as 2,300 feet I picked up on a bit of pinging under the hood. I switched to higher octane and it almost went away (the little left turned out to be one loose spark plug wire). Yeah, I know, there's a lot of research against the use of acetone, but I've used it in small quantities in bigger engines before to only find it of use.

I had a long argument about it once with a "gentleman" on YouTube and I learned from him that acetone actually is more difficult to burn. So, I doubled up on my acetone treatment (normally 2-4 ounces of acetone per 10 gallons) drove hard forward and backwards to mix it a few times and off I went. The pinging settled down as low as if I had had a higher octane fuel. Before you try acetone, try reading my article about Acetone in Gasoline and the failures it can cause are found everywhere. I mostly just discuss how it affected my car's miles per gallon, but you don't have to to take my word for how it messes up rubber hoses faster, how it retains water, how it...wait, that sounds just like ethanol!

by AutoBravado

New Distributor Cap for a 2004 Nissan Frontier 3.3 V6

As a matter of course in maintenance, we should replace, distributor caps and rotors, spark plugs, and spark plug wires right? In this article, we'll discuss this and the effect it had on my Nissan Frontier's timing advance.

Distributor Cap

Taking a look at my old distributor cap, the contacts were worn. Instead of them facing flat to the rotor, they had worn away and become angled. This is a good sign that I was correct  to replace the distributor cap. I normally would replace the distributor rotor at the same time, but I'm still waiting for it to arrive. Summit Racing's website has good prices and 1 product I've ordered there came quickly out of a few, but other parts were projected to not arrive for over a month, so I bought it at
AutopartsWarehouse. Cost more, but I couldn't wait when I could hear my engine missing.

Spark plug wires. 

Normally, on a vehicle of this age, spark plug wires probably should have been replaced a few times, but the stock spark plug wires have endured incredibly well. Checking the ohms of resistance, they're still better quality than spark plug wires available new on the shelf (at aftermarket parts stores).

I have put new platinum spark plugs, as per recommended by Nissan in the 2004 owners manual. I've run them through about a year of driving and while they have needed some regapping to be running just right, they still don't look worn...good for the spark plug and the condition of my engine, bad as I don't want to waste them and I've been dying to try out some iridium spark plugs for months, lol (They're on my shelf just waiting for me! They were on sale, that almost never happens.).

Timing Advance.

Timing advance has a modern technique to it in current designs. Cars adjust their timing advance continually based on load and RPM. Generally the faster the engine is spinning, the more timing advance you need. Meaning, the spark will be initiated before top dead center or BTDC. The flame front takes time to fully combust the fuel, so at higher RPM more timing advance was needed.

I observed through my torque app that timing advance went up to 28 degrees when I let off the gas completely or went into neutral. It'd come down to 10 to 16 degrees of timing advance when under load or acceleration.

I believe the truck was compensating for the worn distributor cap. Now it behaves normally when accelerating by going up instead of being decreased. I believe the additional gap from the worn points in the distributor gap was making the flame front be late due to raised resistance. So the PCM has a program to compensate.

Truck Miles per gallon.

Now that this has changed, my truck's miles per gallon when cruising seems to be a lot better. I won't report back until I've used a couple gas tanks of gasoline to be sure versus just the belief of improved miles per gallon that has been estimated by my Torque App.

by AutoBravado