My manual for my 2005 F4i says to use 86 or higher.
Under the seat is a sticker that says: "FUEL: GASOLINE 91 RON MIN."
What is RON? Is it the same as octane? Which do I use?

(BTW, the dealer was not much help, nor was Honda Canada.
The Honda Canada rep. said: " my boyfriend uses... blah blah blah" - no I'm not kidding!)

Cheers! Paul Devlin

 

It depends on your compression ratio as to what fuel you should run. Also if you have problems with detonation (pinging) you should try the next highest octane in your bike. If it runs fine on the 86 octane, that's all you need. If it doesn't run without pinging under load, just switch to the 91 octane.

My '88 CBR1000 has a 10.5 to 1 compression ratio. It states at least 91 octane fuel. If you have a service manual, it should list the compression ratio, and the recommended fuel to run also.

Good luck
Bob

 

To answer your question, RON is a Research Octane Rating. It is an octane rating under a very specific set of test conditions. In Europe, the octane stated at the pump is the same as RON. In the US and Canada, the octane listed at the pump is DON which is an average of RON and MON (hence, why you see the octane computed with the (R+M)/2 method on the pumps). Because of this differnce, 87 octane in the US is about 92 octane in Europe. So when your manual says use 86 octane and the bike says 91 RON, they're saying the same thing.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Octane_rating

 

Damn abadfish, thats some intresting shiz there! Cool!

 

Tis true -- 'merican gas is betta than the other stuff. I don't have any clue as to Canadian gas. There are at least 5 different tests to determine octane rating. Basically Clovisrider gave the best advice -- as long as you're running a normally aspirated engine run the lowest octane that doesn't detonate (ping) under a load. You actually get more power (although it is a very small gain) by running lower octane than high.