Can somebody please explain how to tell when methanol goes bad?

 

What is the methanol stored in? And what are you using it for? Meth injection?

It can't exactly go "bad", but it can absorb water over time. In a sealed glass/metal container, it will be fine for years. You could test water content by measuring density, as methanol has a density of 0.792 g/ml & water is 1 g/ml. If you're injecting it with aux. injection, a tiny bit of water won't matter.

 

Testing Methanol for Purity | Quality Testing

 

^My thoughts too. Not aware of anyone who injects 100% methanol...unless maybe on a drag strip. It's usually mixed with distilled water anyway.
Seems like it would have to absorb a huge amount of water to affect ratios significantly.

 

To much water content is illegal in some forms of motorsports. Checked by density. Must fall between certian perimeters.

 

Not a track guy, so that may be.
But for the street I'd think you'd want to keep the methanol somewhere below 50% (to water) anyway to reduce the fire hazard.

 

i don't really see why they would care, perhaps the other way around because water has 0 energy content but acts as a knock suppressant and raises running compression but offsets that power because as mentioned, 0 energy content. alcohol on the other hand does a bit of both but not as efficient as a knock suppressor.

 

Thanks for all of the replies and information.

I am ordering a hydrometer to be able to test my fuel. This is a little more hystery of what happened;

I have a set of 4 ID1600’s that I am running as secondary injectors with methanol on my rotary. We were on the dyno for two days and have come a cross something that I have never heard of. Here’s what happened:

We come to a point of tuning that the upper rpm’s were lean under boost. As I was increasing the milliseconds for the injectors I ran into Max duty cycle. To solve this we increased the fuel pressure from 50psi to 60psi base setting. Which would be 80psi under 1 to 1 boost reference. The problem keep getting worse and worse. Long story short – after changing everything including the Microtech computer nothing seemed to solve the problem. Now this is where you can help me. After looking at the data from the last day and a half we found that increasing the fuel pressure did not help us out at all. So we went back down to 50psi. It seemed to help. So we went down to 40psi and now the bottom rpm’s are lean, which makes sense. In the upper rpm’s we are starting to be rich, to the point that it is flooding the engine at 7000rpm. Now as I take fuel out of the upper rpm maps it is starting to work better. Our inital thoughts were the methanol had gone bad. So we pumped some new methanol, which did not help. It seems that we must have been exceeding the pressure limits of the injectors? I am using a magna fuel gear drive pump for the secondary injection.

I was on the dyno for a little bit again today and it is getting better now. We turned the pressure down to 40psi base and now are running low 9's A/F above 6500rpm. Everytime we take fuel away now it makes more power. We made 384rwhp @ 7400 @ 16psi boost with a/f still in the lower 9's. I will be back on the dyno again tomorrow to try and get the a/f's in the high 11's. we are hoping for around 425rwhp @ 16psi.

Thanks for listening and I look forward to some feed back.