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Thread: Cold start e85

  1. #1
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    Cold start e85

    So it?s currently 16* Fahrenheit in my part of Texas and I have e85 in the tank. It takes quite a couple times to get it to fire over. Has anyway ever figured how to make cold starts below 40 better. It never gets this cold usually so I never made a point to figure it out. Do you just copy your optimum stability cam angle table to your emissions reduction? And the snap to lines? It seems that it commands an aggressive overlap to heat up cats that aren?t there. Also I?m sure adjusting cold start timing might help since it usually sees -10 to -5 degrees of timing. Anyways I?m just rambling
    ?Our greatest success comes from failure? -Confucius

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    Curious here. It was 0 today and my truck fired right up. Been as low as -12 and no issues. I even think cranking fuel I set to 1.0 lambda. What my cam angles do I forget but it should all be relatively stock. ?16 f150 but I had a 13 mustang with the same injectors and CJ/mono on it with no issues either when I?d leave it outside. Even a supercharged boss 302 with a 3.6 kb on it would fire right up. E85 only (flex disabled on the truck). I?ve run e85 in a 4.0 explorer and 4.3 blazer and those also would not hesitate on startup in cold. Spark might be more advanced Id have to look honestly I don?t remember lol

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    Some of that is due to the E blend you are getting. Some areas in the south don't change the winter blend much, if at all. If you are in a area that seldom sees really cold temps, there may be too little petro in it. I don't have E in my area so I buy it during the summer and store it in my shop. It's tests @ 87% and I have a hard time getting the car started when temps are in the 30s. If there are any tips to help the cold starts on high ethanol content fuel, I would love to hear them.
    Last edited by txcharlie; 02-12-2021 at 03:29 PM.

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    Quote Originally Posted by txcharlie View Post
    Some of that is due to the E blend you are getting. Some areas in the south don't change the winter blend much, if at all. If you are in a area that seldom sees really cold temps, there may be too little petro in it. I don't have E in my area so I buy it during the summer and store it in my shop. It's tests @ 87% and I have a hard time getting the car started when temps are in the 30s. If there are any tips to help the cold starts on high ethanol content fuel, I would love to hear them.
    I?m going to try the changing the cam values first and see. My flex fuel tables are setup exactly like the f150
    So given that, I would imagine it would be cam related because the f150 intake cams are less aggressive and the tuning is different for them.

  5. #5
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    It is a vapor pressure issue. Alcohol doesn't vaporize at low temps so in order to start you need to get the engine temp high enough to vaporize the fuel. Long cranking time can do this, but it also is hard on the starter. I got very worried the first time this happened to me. I did not know pushing the start button again would stop the starter. The truck started after about 1 min of cranking. This was at a temp around +25 F

    Ever go to a national drag race? The Alcohol cars all get started by having someone add real gas to the injector hat while cranking.

    Reducing overlap to 0 might help elevate cylinder temps.
    Last edited by K44; 02-12-2021 at 07:12 PM.

  6. #6
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    Quote Originally Posted by txcharlie View Post
    Some of that is due to the E blend you are getting. Some areas in the south don't change the winter blend much, if at all. If you are in a area that seldom sees really cold temps, there may be too little petro in it. I don't have E in my area so I buy it during the summer and store it in my shop. It's tests @ 87% and I have a hard time getting the car started when temps are in the 30s. If there are any tips to help the cold starts on high ethanol content fuel, I would love to hear them.

    I suppose I could test it and see what?s actually in the tank. I?ll try to find my test tube and see. I forgot about winter blend lol.

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    Quote Originally Posted by mattlinke View Post
    I suppose I could test it and see what?s actually in the tank. I?ll try to find my test tube and see. I forgot about winter blend lol.
    Yeah Texas usually doesn?t lessen their blend at least where I am it?s consistently 85-90% it would be nice to get square away though.

  8. #8
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    I didn?t wait for it to completely settle because I was leaving for work but it looks like it would have ended somewhere around 70% or so. That seems like it is kinda high to me. I have a flex fuel sensor in the line that I run on an arduino to show the content but the board that ran it stopped working, otherwise I would be able to reference that. It was too dang cold out to tenaciously investigate it though. Maybe I?ll fix that. Or I can run a datalog on my wife?s GM since she fills up at the same station and it has a sensor in it and see. Too cold though. Lol. Dang winter.

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    I copied the flex fuel cranking fuel quantity into the normal cranking fuel quantity table and my e85 starts first hit no matter how cold. That’s all I changed. Before I was also struggling to start when cold.

    Don’t have my laptop out, but think I described the table correctly, cranking fuel quantity, there are 2, one is the flex one.

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    Quote Originally Posted by Plimmer View Post
    I copied the flex fuel cranking fuel quantity into the normal cranking fuel quantity table and my e85 starts first hit no matter how cold. That’s all I changed. Before I was also struggling to start when cold.

    Don’t have my laptop out, but think I described the table correctly, cranking fuel quantity, there are 2, one is the flex one.
    yeah isnt it the cranking fuel and cranking flex fuel tab and the values are in terms of stoich. And being from san antonio you know the freak weather we had last week. It was like 5*F here in lubbock and my car was not having it.
    ?Our greatest success comes from failure? -Confucius

  11. #11
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    Screen Shot 2021-02-27 at 9.13.53 AM.png

    These are the tables I was talking about. I copied the Flex Fuel one into the normal one and my e85 fires up first hit.

  12. #12
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    The cam timing during crank is the park position of 0,0, so any changes made to the schedules will not affect cranking. The phasers aren’t active at that time.