Gas stations in Michigan don't have labeling requirements for E10, since it is now considered the standard, so it makes it very hard to find one that sells ethanol free gas.
Some marinas and small airports have it and a few stations near recreational areas. Most of the time when you ask the people behind the counter, they don't have a clue. I get cans of it at a distributor that sells gas for agricultural use.
Here's a site that has some places, by state, that are supposed to sell E0 but I don't know how reliable it is.
It looks like Qwerty is lucky. They list a lot of places in Tennessee.
EDIT: Another website with real gas info:
http://www.buyrealgas.com/
Actually, I've done the work to add many sites with real gas in Tennessee. You can use the separation methods described earlier in this thread to remove ethanol. If there is no ethanol in your gas, it won't hurt the gas in any way. To find out if there is ethanol, simply measure the volume of water you use to initiate separation. The change in the volume of water is the amount of ethanol removed. No change, no ethanol. A simple tall, skinny glass olive jar is a good tool for measuring ethanol content--no need to buy a large volume of full for testing. Measure 11 equal volumes of liquid from the bottom up. Fill with water to the first volume marking. Add 10 volumes of fuel. Cap and shake well. Set the bottle down to allow the contents to settle. If you have E0, you'll end up with 1 volume of water on the bottom, and 10 volumes of fuel floating above. If you have E10, you'll end up with 2 volumes of water and ethanol on the bottom, and 9 volumes of fuel floating on top. E15 yields 2.5 volumes of water and ethanol and 8.5 volumes of fuel. Don't be surprised if your "E10" yields anywhere from 2% to 20% ethanol. Our testing has found ethanol content to be extremely variable, no matter what brand of E10 tested.
The ethanol fiasco is promoted by agri-business and fuel ethanol distillers and is not going anywhere. The only "studies" done that support grain-based fuel ethanol programs are bought and paid for by ethanol and agri-business organizations, and the best they can claim is that ethanol has the
potential to be energy positive IF, and ONLY IF, non-prehistoric energy sources are used to grow the grain, transport the grain, distill the ethanol, transport the ethanol, ...,
ad nauseum. Independent studies of what is really going on in the industry find ethanol to be 15-75% energy negative, depending on market. Fuel ethanol is a bad policy that allows organized groups of business persons the force of law to steal from the public in the form of higher sales volumes of agricultural products at artificially inflated prices, and not just for fuel, but also for every bite of food that goes in your mouth, and everything else you buy due to increased transportation costs. Don't just vote the crooked politicians out, tell them why they won't get your vote.
I believe the development of alternative fuels is crucial to a somewhat peaceful world in the future. The U. S. military is heavily involved in research to fuel itself with domestic alternatives. One caveat with military fuels is performance losses = dead troops. If alternative fuels can actually replace conventional fuels, the military will find the way. Take the ethanol industry subsidies and apply that money to the military alternative fuels program--it will be much wiser spent there than given to a bunch of glorified bootleggers and inbred bubbas.
In the meanwhile, invest a little time and money and effort in building and operating a system that removes the contaminates from fuel, restore the octane (or simply start with E10 3-4 octane higher than what your engine needs), and enjoy all the performance your TW was designed to deliver.
I finally got around to analyzing the results of some actual performance testing of fuels we did a couple weeks ago when we had a few consecutive days of consistent weather with very light winds. Nice thing about a TW is the limited top speed. It is possible to make timed runs on a nearby section of level, straight, limited access highway with a 70mph speed limit and little traffic, without arousing the ire of law enforcement. It is also super easy to swap from one fuel to another simply by swapping auxilary tanks in the top box, plugging in a fuel line, and draining the carb.
Radar-timed, Tdub, with carb jetting and gearing optimized for E10, did a 2-way average of 66.066mph on Shell 87 (R+M)/2 E10. The tank was swapped and the carb and fuel line drained, and the timing repeated within 10 minutes on the same road using the same radar operated by the same man, the only difference being a change in fuel to Shell V-Power Premium with the ethanol removed by the simple separation method I've already described, which yielded 87.3 (R+M)/2 E0, and Tdub's 2-way average was 71.222mph. 87 (R+M)/2 E10 with the ethanol removed and the octane restored by replacing the ethanol with an equal volume of toluene was also tested. Each of the three variations of Shell fuel was tested three times, changing nothing but fuel, yielded a consistent and repeatable 2-way average of 66.xxxmph for E10, 71.xxxmph for E0 of the Shell brand, mattered not if the E0 was de-contaminated V-Power Premium E10 or decontaminated and treated 87 (R+M)/2 E10.
Our control fuel was an 87 (R+M)/2 E0 pumped from a local independent station. Two control tests were run before and after each series of test for each brand. The first control test was from fuel purchased at the beginning of the experiment series, the second test was fuel from the same pump purchased just before the experiments were begun each day. This allowed for correcting for weather conditions if necessary, which wasn't due to choosing days of consistent weather to perform the testing. This also allowed us to correct for variations in the composition of the control fuel, which also wasn't necessary.
The experiment was repeated with every major brand of ethanol available in our little town that sold both 87 and 91 or better E10. All yielded a 5 to 7 mph difference in top speed between the 87 (R+M)/2 E10 and ~87 (R+M)/2 derived from each brand's premium E10 or treated 87 (R+M)/2 E10. Major brands tested included Shell, BP, Exxon, Citgo, and Murphy's (Walmart). Exxon was within 0.6mph of Shell, followed by Citgo (1.2mph slower than Shell), Murphy's (4.4mph slower than Shell), and BP (4.6mph slower than Shell). All E10s were ± 0.91% of 10% by volume at standard temperature and pressure. We did not attempt to correct to exactly 10% ethanol content. We acknowledge the probability that nearly a 2% difference in ethanol content could skew results, and we did find that the higher the ethanol content, the greater the difference in performance between fuel contaminated with ethanol and the same fuel's decontaminated derivatives.
Optimizing Tdub's jetting and sprockets for E0 consistently raised the top speed from 1.899 to 2.243mph over E0 in the testing. The best performing fuel was the Shell 87.3 (R+M)/2 E0 with a 2-way average of 73.465mph, just 0.009mph faster than our control fuel performance on that day.
We were surprised that the performance differences were consistent by brand--speed dropped about the same for the E10 as the E0 derived from premium E10, compared to other brands. We were not surprised that the actual performance tests did not vary one bit from the results of dyno testing the same fuels with Tdub on the rollers. That repeatability of results across multiple tests of multiple procedures validates the conclusion that ethanol is a bad idea.
I actually get paid for doing this testing!
It does get kind of tiring after 160 top speed runs over 3 days. I even convinced the university to replace the float bowl and drain screw we wore out.
