In a recent post Ken Payne told me the octane boosters on the market are a scam. It's not that I did not believe him, because I really did.

But, I wanted to do some research on it and here's what I lifted from a report on racing fuels by Scott Parkhurst, Popular Hot Rodding, January, 1998:

"Octane boosters offer little help in the quest for higher octane. Most popular street-legal octane boosters claim increases in octane ratings up to five points, and those boosters intended for off-road use only claim up to seven points. That’s a lot of octane to hope for simply by pouring an additive in a tank. Sunoco told us that before they launched their GT-100 Unleaded retail pilot program, they wanted to be sure that a 100 (R+M)/2 octane street-legal fuel would be of value, and that enthusiasts would not be able to get the same (or better) results using an octane booster. Nine of the most popular retail octane boosters were put through a series of tests to determine where the consumer could get the most bang for the buck. The test results were verified by an independent testing facility, using several brands of regular unleaded and premium gasolines, just to make sure everything was legit.

According to Mark Borosky, Vehicle Test Engineer for Sunoco, "Of the nine octane boosters tested, none showed a significant increase, and one actually lowered the octane number of the test gasolines." Testing repeatedly showed a maximum increase in octane of 3.5 points by only two of the six street-legal octane boosters when the recommended treatment rate was blended with lower base 87-octane gasoline. The best the remaining four products could muster was less than a one point increase. "While clearly no one would actually use an octane booster in a low base octane fuel, we wanted to give the manufacturers the benefit of the doubt relative to their claims of five-to-seven point increases" explained Borosky.

When tests were performed using 98 and 94-octane fuel, even the two best products from the previous tests produced a disappointing 1.5 to 2 point maximum increase. The remaining four street-legal octane boosters showed less than a .5 point increase. Those products designated for off-road use only didn’t fare any better than the street-legal products. Subsequent tests where the dosage of octane booster was doubled, tripled, and even quadrupled produced only minimal improvements in octane, regardless of the base octane hum-ber of the test gas. In fact, quadrupling the treatment rate of the most powerful additive produced only a 3.5 point increase in octane when added to 98 premium, resulting in a cost of $3.25 a gallon."

Just goes to show you the info dispensed here by the ones in the know can be trusted.

 

Great info! Isn't it wonderful when someone actually puts a number where their mouth is?

The next hoax I'd like to see taken to the woodshed is oil additives. TK

thanks for the post pops!

 

Ah, yes! That's another one of my peeves. Snake oil addititives that you can run with your engine oil sump dry.

As a matter of fact I have done some tribology research to satisfy some of my own suspicions about PTFE, and others. Some are nothing more than a lot of zinc, others mineral oil tinted, and still others are just kerosene.

When DuPont asked why one famous company was buying so much of their PTFE, they refused to sell it to them anymore. They even went so far as to publish a disclaimer stating Teflon was not a lubricant and could not be safely used as such.

Consumers Reports did a good expose on one big name oil additive in a well documented tribology report.

Attempting to imitate the claim by one oil addititive's commercial, they tried just what they said could be done ....they drained the crankcase. The engine seized in a few short minutes. No surprise there!


I'll see what I can dig up!

 

...and so after DuPont stopped selling teflon to snake oil companies, bootleggers started making imitation teflon in China, which was promptly formulated into the snake oil market. I think that by now everybody knows better than to add anything at all to their oil.

The additives that are actually helpful are already in motor oil (e.g. zinc, molyblendum, etc.). It's funny how some no-name company can claim to improve upon the billions of $$ in research and decades of experience common to refiners like Exxon-Mobile, Texaco, Castrol, etc.

Zmax is the all time cake-winner though: they not only perfected motor oil, but transmission fluid as well, and they put it all in an easy-to-use package that you simply pour in! All this awesome performance for the ultra-low price of $49.95!

 

yes, I forgot to mention that! They went off-shore to find other sources of PTFE. DuPont wanted no part of the inevitable law suits comming down the pike.

 

what i use for an octane booster when i messed around with it is air brake anti freeze for semis. look on the back of a normal octane booster botle main ingreedent is methenol. air brake anti freze in pure methnol. and is only 10$ a gallon just watch on how much you use i used 1/2 gallon to a full tank of gas"18 gal" and that seemed suffecent. any more you are risking you vavles being burnt. hope this helps , andy

 

I guess thats why a couple 99cent bottles of dry gas, the ones with methanol helped me pass emisions. I would have to check my emision results but I think it only lowered the hydrocarbons.

 

yes methenol drops your hydro carbons but at the same time it burns hotter. for example if you take 12 cup methnol and 1 cup water and mix it you can soak it up with a junk towel or rag and burn it like it was pure gas. lol wonderful experment but it does work becareful lol

 

i ment 1/2 cup methnol and 1 cup water sry

 

I apologize for reviving an old thread, but I would like to read this report, where did you read it, is there a link to it on the web?

 

I played around with home brew octain booster a while back. I usually run premium fuel to avoid spark knock without backing down my advance. I found some home brews online and tried them out with some success. I don't remember off hand the ratios but most of them use either touluene or Zileen. (sp). I got to the point I could run regular gas and a pint or so of the homebrew and not spark knock and actually feel a little better throttle response.
It seems that the gas companys use these chemicals in the gas when they are producing it to vmake the different octains.
Do a search on it. It's pretty interresting
Clint

 

okay Ill try that, if no luck Ill come back and repost, thanks

 

http://www.ducatimeccanica.com/gas.html

Sorry I took so long to find it again.

 

A very good octane booster is Toluene (114 octane) or Xylene (117 octane). I've used both in my performance vehicles without problems. I think they cost about 10 bucks a gallon.

 

Excellent article, thank you, the reason I jumped in on this thread is that I have a 73 f100 (see sig) with a hi-comp 429 and I am trying to come up with ways to get it to run well (not even sure if thats necessary as it isnt up and running yet).....so that said it sounds like home-made octane booster is the only way to go if I take that road, but what about lead substitute, anyone have any info on whether that is snake oil, or something worthy of my attention?