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Originally Posted by StephenLawson
Each production of the Mercedes 180 - 200hp inline six had specific fuel mix requirements for max performance. Several American pilots learned the hard way that the Benzine could not be replaced by fuel normally used by the AEF. There are several accounts where the fuel toleration by a specific engine could be rated as needing high octane or low octane tractor fuel. I suspect that the 200hp was the less tolerant and demanded higher octane.
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Stephen, this is a little off topic, but do you have any idea how they brewed their fuel to the specific requirements of each engine? There seemed to be knowledge at that time that ethyl alcohol would improve knock resistance, so mixing in a percentage of alcohol would have been an achievable method of selective octane boosting to meet engine requirements. They could also have selected the lighter (naptha) end of the refinery cut when they distilled their fuel but this would have been a real logistic headache and would only have moved them up to about 60 octane. But knowing how creative they were back then, they probably did something I just haven't yet imagined.
12 June 2005, 09:35 AM
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